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A masterful story of friendship and how much we’re willing to risk to possess one of life’s most treasured mercies: a second chance
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER AND TIKTOK SENSATION
Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
Author: Ocean Vuong
Paperback Published 13 May 2025 416 pages
Read and Recommended by Charles:
"The Emperor of Gladness is a touching, forceful novel about members of a team working at HomeMarket, a fast food restaurant in East Gladness, Connecticut. The novel slowly draws out each character as we are placed deep inside their modest yet poignant worlds. It is not a novel driven by plot, at least not at first. For a while, it wanders – a bit earnest, a little too weightless. But slowly, Vuong builds it into something extraordinary.
The novel’s heart sits with Hai, a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American boy hiding from his mother after lying to her about leaving to attend medical school. Hai is addicted, adrift – he has already dropped out of college once following the death by drugs of his best friend and likely lover - and, following an almost-attempt at suicide on the bridge on the outskirts of Gladness, begins sharing a house with Grazina, an older Lithuanian woman slipping into dementia. Their bond, born of separate but parallel estrangements, is quiet, strange, and deeply moving. They play war games from her fractured memories of childhood in occupied Europe, as she slips into a state of confusion between the past and present, initially only occasionally, but then more often as the book goes on, even as Hai nods off mid-conversation.
Around them, a constellation of characters form: Sony, Hai’s cousin - who may be autistic and whose portrayal by Vuong is brilliant - is obsessed with Civil War generals and the myth of American heroism. Sony’s mother is in jail. BJ, a co-worker, performs homemade rap and amateur wrestling while Wayne, the shift supervisor, manages them like a warden with a soft underbelly. Maureen and “Russia” make up the balance.
Loss pulses through the novel - loss of direction, of family, of memory, loss as a result of deceit. Sony believes his father was a hero in the Vietnam War and had a diamond lodged in his hand following a blast from a grenade. After being fired from HomeMarket at the direction of a crazed regional manager, Sony, along with Hai, Grazina, BJ, and Maureen, go on a quick dash across State-lines to find the diamond, it’s worth enough to pay the bond to get Sony’s Mum out of jail. They don’t recover it, but they locate the site of the car crash where Sony’s father likely committed suicide. Grazina’s son meanwhile, cruel and uncomfortable around her dementia, eventually moves her into a nursing home. And Hai, spiralling, having lost Grazina and deep in the tangle of lies he has told his mother, his addiction to pain killers worsening, manages a moment of clarity from within a dumpster he lies in outside the HomeMarket: “He had successfully thrown himself into the trash, and the act was so complete, so total, it felt clean.”
Vuong generally, although not entirely, resists the need to explain or repair. Everyone in The Emperor of Gladness carries fissures within them - failures, depressions, small cruelties, but the novel, intentionally, never insists on naming them in order to heal them. It’s enough that they exist and are seen.
There is an earnestness that chips away at the first part of the book, but the characters and the story develop in a taught, finely drawn way that by their clarity and depth signal Vuong as a novelist with great skill. It carries a heavy dose of symbolism - wrestling matches, pig slaughters, a glowing green ship in a forest, a giant brown Emperor hog whistling “Silent Night”, but none of that detracts from its beauty. Vuong still has room for development as a novelist – perhaps some scenes were unjustified, some explanation unnecessary - but the novel is a real technical achievement. A book of tender devastation, filled with grace and deep humanity. A quiet, profound epic, and an ode to the invisible workers of the world."