- Published: 13 May 2025
- ISBN: 9781787335417
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 416
- RRP: $38.00
The Emperor of Gladness











- Published: 13 May 2025
- ISBN: 9781787335417
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 416
- RRP: $38.00
[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 deeply moving book – I welled up roughly every 40 pages… one of the great strengths of this book is the way it elevates the personal into the political. Little Dog’s story is the story of modern America
Daily Telegraph
A marvel
Marlon James
A masterpiece: a staggeringly beautiful book.. the Great American Novel. A huge gift to the world
Max Porter
A stunning, beautiful book... His writing is phenomenal... Simply brilliant
BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review
Luminous, shattering, urgent, necessary
Celeste Ng
This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read... Ocean Vuong is a master. This book is a masterpiece
Tommy Orange
He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable – indeed, gorgeous – novel
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Praise for Ocean Vuong
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Reminded me that every word can be an incantation, and that beauty does hard and important work
Rebecca Solnit
This is some of the most moving writing I’ve read… The tenderness of the prose feels like a triumph against a world hellbent on embittering the tenderhearted… the truths arrived at in this book are valuable precisely because they are steeped in feeling
New York Times
Utterly captivating writing
Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail
Vuong is a prodigious talent, his handling of words and images both brutal and delicate, his treatment of violence, sex and the body radically clear-eyed
Financial Times
Vuong mines his extraordinary family story with passion and beauty… Vuong writes wonderfully
Tessa Hadley, Guardian
Vuong’s determination to see well-trodden ground afresh, with unremitting complexity, is extremely rare... An exciting talent
Sunday Times