The Emperor of Gladness: Oprah's Book Club
A Novel
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3.9 • 328 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The instant New York Times bestseller • Oprah’s Book Club Pick • Named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, USA Today, NPR, People, Christian Science Monitor, Scientific American, and Kirkus Reviews • Winner of the Nautilus Book Award • Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
“Stunning . . . A heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.” —Oprah Winfrey
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…
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 transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on 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 Ocean 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong takes readers on an unforgettable journey through a young man’s search for a way forward in a hardscrabble New England town. Nineteen-year-old Hai is the son of Vietnamese immigrants who has washed out of college and is struggling with an addiction to painkillers. On the verge of dying by suicide, he’s urged back from the brink by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian expatriate with dementia. Hai moves into Grazina’s ramshackle house and looks after her as he makes a living working at a fast-casual restaurant, tries to control his drug intake, and nurtures an ambition to be a writer. The Emperor of Gladness is filled with remarkable characters whose world is by turns surreal and painfully recognizable as they wrestle against their lives on the margins. Vuong’s prose is witty, poignant, and utterly original—it’s brilliant storytelling from a writer with a one-of-a-kind talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Vuong follows up his acclaimed first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, with a searching and beautiful story of a troubled young man. "The hardest thing in the world is to live only once," 19-year-old Hai narrates in the opening line, but there's a dark edge to the sentiment. The reader first meets Hai on a bridge in East Gladness, Conn., where he's about to jump to his death. He's stopped by Grazina, an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman. She invites him to stay with her, and as her dementia worsens, he cares for her—feeding her, bathing her, and administering medicine. The experience soothes Hai: "How strange to feel something so close to mercy... at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river." Hai tells his mother he is attending medical school, but in fact, shortly before meeting Grazina, he was released from rehab for opioid addiction. Now, while staying with the older woman, he takes a job at the restaurant where his cousin works, and pops Dilaudids "to hold him over" during shifts. Vuong's scenes are vivid, and the pitch-perfect dialogue cuts like a knife ("Never cry in a diner," Grazina tells Hai. "They charge extra if they catch you. Believe me. I've seen it happen"). This downbeat tale soars to astonishing heights.
Customer Reviews
Idk
I honestly don’t know about this, but yes, it’s a good book, but I felt like it was all over the place so many stories and many stories that were not related to the main characters. It was kind of weird.
Written like Art
The descriptive paragraph some metaphors are so finally crafted that you want to cut them out and framed them and share with people who visit your house.
Same with the characters, who are really characters
Gave up
Wanted to like it but gave up 1/4 way through. It’s something when you don’t even care what happens.