The Emperor of Gladness

[An] innovative, playful novel’

Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

Sad, haunting but ultimately hopeful this is a gut punch and an warm embrace rendered out of poetic, tender prose

AnOther, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Its two main characters - the young Hai, so smart and troubled and ready for the world, and Grazina, who carries the weight of history as both burden and rare wisdom - are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world

Colm Tóibín

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

A masterwork

Bryan Washington

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

Kirkus Starred Review

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

Bookseller

Exquisite… Life at the margins of modern America has rarely felt so vivid

Mail on Sunday

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

Guardian

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

Guardian

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

Observer

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

ArtReview

His most vivid, ambitious work yet

Dazed

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

Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime … it’s poetic literature and I think that Ocean Vuong’s ability to capture the essence of just ordinary people is like nobody I’ve ever experienced

Oprah Winfrey

Devastatingly beautiful…a captivating tale of what it means to be human

UK Press Syndication

A book of moral, imaginative ideas with gripping stories, wonderful characters and writing that’s poetic and witty. I loved it

Spectator

An ode to chosen families… Ocean Vuong’s poetic novel takes us on a journey through time, loss, trauma and the little acts of kindness that help us heal

Harper’s Bazaar

Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists

Los Angeles Times

There are moments that made me laugh out loud in the midst of the beauty and the pain and the epic sweep of these individual lives

Ari Shapiro

On the surface, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins and how they survive hardship, but it’s also a story of how contradictions often exist in conjunction. War and loss run through the pages of The Emperor of Gladness, but so do love and joy. Estrangement ripples through the novel too, yet The Emperor of Gladness celebrates profound connections . . . Soulful and at times heart-wrenching

The Seattle Times

In [The Emperor of Gladness] Ocean Vuong blends grief, healing, and resilience into a powerful and poetic narrative

PBS NewsHour

The Emperor of Gladness has all the poetic meditations and lyricism of Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but with a lovable cast of found family characters that practically leap off the page

USA Today

An admirable compliment to [Vuong’s] resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through... A reader’s high is imminent with Vuong . . . His prose often forces you to look up from the page to fully absorb them and remember where you really are

Chicago Review of Books

The Emperor of Gladness takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances... Vuong achieves more by writing beside his characters than one would by writing a straightforward story about them. True and gritty

Associated Press

Magisterial, precise and mythic in its resonance

BookPage

Ocean Vuong crafts a story of intergenerational connection — of labor, love, memory, and care — while bridging the intimate and the epic, the lyric and the narrative... The Emperor of Gladness is a testament to the ways we find — and carve out — a sense of home in one another... The Emperor of Gladness offers readers a special gift: the practice of looking carefully at the world around us, and at the people who surround us, with more meaning and care.

Poets & Writers