The Emperor of Gladness

By: Ocean Vuong

Narrated by: James Aaron Oh

Brought to you by Penguin.

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A Most Anticipated Book in Guardian, Financial Times, Sunday Times Style, BBC, GQ, New York Times and AnOther.

Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful 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 a bridge, 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. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond that has the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unlikely of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.

This is an unforgettable story of unexpected friendship and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

‘Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time' Guardian

‘A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain’ Observer

‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ OPRAH WINFREY

© Ocean Vuong 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critic reviews

A fine-grained social panorama driven by the developing camaraderie of an ensemble cast bonded in precariousness and pain

Depicts the emotions of its protagonists with a sensitivity and lusciousness… contains moments of almost unbearable poignancy

Firmly grounded and perfectly tuned… With its poetic morsels, ambivalent love for the rural northeast, and many-layered immigrant stories, The Emperor of Gladness may well be the first millennial Great American Novel

Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become

Tender and moving, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins of society and sanity. To my surprise and delight, Vuong’s novel is also wryly, subtly, wittily - and sometimes outrageously - a comedy as well as a tragedy (Rebecca Solnit)

His most vivid, ambitious work yet

Remarkable... A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations

[A] heartbreaking epic… Witten in Vuong’s inimitable prose…[it] will doubtless be counted among the great American novels

A masterwork (Bryan Washington)

This stunning book moved me so much, I fell in love with its characters and grieved their absence in my life when I turned the last page (Caitríona Balfe)

A piece of life

The writing was intelligent, the story gritty, the narrator pulled you along a path with characters that face life’s challenges. I’m glad to of met them.
Sometimes we need to read a story like this to remind us what everyday life is for others, it can be hard, very hard.