A lyrical masterpiece of a novel from Ocean Vuong yet again. Ocean's poetical style really shows all the way through in this novel, helping to tell what is at heart a novel with layers upon layers of sadness with such beauty that the glimmers of light somehow transform it into something positive.

I hold a special place in my heart for this style of writing and it doesn't come around often. I'll be recommending it at every possible opportunity and likely gifting it to friends too.

Hai has detonated his life in a haze of tragedy and prescription drugs. Hiding out from his mother he ends up living with an elderly woman whose past is catching up with her and working with his civil war obsessed cousin in a low rent restaurant. Hai is mourning his life and accidentally building a strange new family of waifs and strays along the way.

This is beautiful and strange. Sad and funny, devastating and quietly celebratory. I loved it.

The Emperor of Gladness is Ocean Vuong’s new novel, a story about a young Vietnamese American man whose chance meeting with a elderly Lithuanian woman changes both their and others’ lives. Hai is a college dropout standing on a bridge ready to jump, until Grazina stops him. She’s a widow who lives alone and invites him to live with her. Hai gets a job at the local fast food restaurant his cousin works at and helps Grazina to remember to take her medication, and she offers him another chance to live.

I love Vuong’s poetry and his previous novel for their lyrical style, but I really enjoyed how The Emperor of Gladness combines a poetic style with compelling characters and their quirks. I wasn’t expecting the crew of his colleagues but they really stand out in the novel, showing what people working in the service industry deal with and the importance of camaraderie and found family to get through things. The more fantastical elements of the novel come through Grazina’s illness, as she forgets who and where she is and believes herself back in Europe, and these parts are sad but again explore the resilience of people.

Hai himself has a bittersweet narrative of addiction, grief, and disappointment, lying to his mother about his life, and he doesn’t get a simple happy story, but instead a complex messy one that doesn’t tie up nicely even as others’ do. Vuong has created another beautifully written book, one that tells a powerful small town America story that sticks with you.

Hope and despair, the family we choose and make ours, loneliness and the failure of society. Beautifully written and haunting in a melancholy way.

Ocean Vuong returns with a searing and tender exploration of love, memory, and survival in The Emperor of Gladness, a haunting book set in the post-industrial quietude of East Gladness, Connecticut. At its centre is Hai, a nineteen-year-old teetering on the edge of despair, and Grazina, an elderly widow battling dementia. Their chance encounter on a rain-swept bridge unspools into a deeply affecting story of intergenerational friendship and unexpected healing.

Hai, adrift in the aftermath of personal loss and a community buckling under the weight of poverty and addiction, finds both purpose and painful reflection in caring for Grazina. In her fractured memories and confusion, she becomes an unlikely mirror to Hai’s own unresolved grief. Their bond offers both characters – and the reader – a glimpse at what it means to keep living, even when every reason not to mounts.

Vuong’s signature style is here in full bloom: lyrical, daring, and profoundly emotional. His sentences are crafted with the care of a poet, but they never feel indulgent. The book moves like memory itself – not always linear, but full of aching clarity and resonance. There’s a quiet revolution in Vuong’s pages: a challenge to how we view care, who gets to be remembered, and the small mercies that carry us through.

With echoes of war and the legacies it leaves behind, Vuong weaves personal and collective trauma into something deeply human and redemptive. The Emperor of Gladness is not simply a story about saving or being saved, but about the gentle art of staying – of choosing connection, even in the ruins.

This is a masterwork of compassion and complexity. A book to sit with, to feel deeply, and to return to.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

The Emperor of Gladness is the first book I’ve read by Ocean Vuong. In no way did I expect what I found within this novel. It is stunningly crafted both in the use of language and the use of characters to transform one another.

We meet 19-year-old Hai. He’s trapped in lies, grief, and addiction. On the night he decides to end it all, he meets Grazina, an 82-year-old widow with dementia. What follows is the story of two people, both immigrants, with vast differences in age and culture. Yet it is a bond that sustains them both as Hai becomes Grazina’s carer.

Hai eventually gets a job at a fast food-type outlet. His coworkers are brilliantly captured by Vuong. These are the people who have been pushed to the edges of society, working-class people, truly marginalised yet with heart and compassion for one another. Through each other they find their sense of worth.

The Emperor of Gladness isn’t a novel to be read quickly. It’s to be lingered over and read slowly, as Ocean Vuong understands the power of words to transform the reader.

Thank you to Random House UK, Vintage Books, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

While I loved many of the characters and was fond of the plot, I found that I didn't really enjoy the reading experience overall.

Ocean Vuong has, to this day, one of the most powerful and evocative writing styles I have ever read - their words just seem to hit me in my soul. This new title is just as stunning. I would give it 6 stars if I could

The unlikely bond between two souls who have had their fair share of difficulties.
Hai and Grazina show us what hurting and survival mean.
Well written and great example of literature.

i love ocean vuong's works, i have read everything he has written and i don't even know how i love every single one of them and like no other, this too is an instant 5 star.
the plot tackles so many heavy topic but the story flows like water, and it flows you with it, and i am really grateful zadie smith for encouraging him to write it.

Ocean Vuong's latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness is much anticipated and already much lauded in advance praise. Vuong is a genuine talent, and reading this you get the real sense of a novelist flexing his literary muscles, widening his scope beyond the intimate focus which made up his debut, 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

Hai is a 19 year old, a drop-out drug addict in the town of East Gladness. He moves in with Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant with dementia, and so begins a reflective tale that discusses many themes, to create a novel that feels both broad and focussed. Vuong is a beautiful writer - he is also a published poet - and there is a rich texture to the language.

I took my time with this novel - it is one to read slowly - and I became fully engaged with life in East Gladness - and felt somewhat bereft when the novel had finished. This fine novel will continue to be lauded, I'm sure, and is the perfect novel for book clubs etc to discuss and tease out the themes of.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

3.5 rounded up

What happens when you escape a war-torn country only to find yourself in another, one that does not care if you live or die, that seems determined to suck away your life force? This is one of the central themes explored in Vuong’s second novel which follows Hai, a 19 year old college dropout struggling with opiate addiction. He moves in with elderly Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant with dementia, acting as her carer in exchange for a place to live.

Hai gets a job at Homemarket, (btw this is how I found out Boston Market went out of business?? RIP) a fast-casual chain restaurant staffed by a diverse cast of characters including his autistic cousin Sony.

Hai is truly adrift, obliterated by grief and shame, numbing himself with pills. He spends the book floating through life, making poignant observations along the way but unable to find a way to be okay.

War is ever-present, from Hai and Grazina’s backgrounds, Sony’s obsession with the Civil war, and the war in Afghanistan fueled by poor young bodies that get spat back out when the military industrial complex no longer has use for them.

This is not an easy read in a lot of ways, the prose beautiful but dense and there is a bleakness that brief moments of light never manage to alleviate. At times it felt like there was too much going on. Certain threads didn’t feel as developed as others, such as the cold murder case and the day spent at a slaughterhouse.

I still felt very moved by the impoverished New England setting, the industrial decay contrasted with the beauty of the natural world. Hai’s connection to Grazina, Sony and his co-workers at Homemarket all felt lifelike and dimensional. This is a novel about the invisible; poor immigrants, food service workers, the disabled, and the elderly, and the constant low-level violence of poverty that slowly grinds them down.

It’s not a page-turner in the traditional sense, but the depth of the ideas makes it worth sticking with. You’ll come away with more questions than answers, in the best way. Great for book clubs or slow, deliberate reading.

Much like Vuong's debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, this book is beautifully written. The words flow off the page and are lyrical and mesmerising. However, it is very slow paced and at times felt quite difficult to digest and read as it is very word heavy if that makes any sense. Vuong is such a talented writer, every sentence is quotable and poetic and I know that this book will be an instant classic and an instant favourite for so many people. For me personally, whilst I adored the writing, it was a very slow burn and kind of dragged on a bit. This is definitely a book that you need to sit with and take your time to read.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is an ambitious and wide in scope novel centered on human connections, second chances and resilience.

The Emperor of Gladness is a haunting, poetic novel that explores the unexpected relationship between Hai, a 19-year-old adrift in grief, and Grazina, an 82-year-old widow slipping into dementia. Ocean Vuong weaves their story with his signature lyrical prose, immersing the reader in a landscape marked by emotional desolation and small, radiant moments of connection. Set in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, the novel moves between memories and present moments with fluid grace, revealing how two seemingly distant lives can intersect and offer each other a strange kind of salvation.

At its core, the novel is about memory—how it fades, how it persists, and how it shapes the way we survive. Vuong doesn’t shy away from pain or violence; instead, he lets it echo through the silences of his characters, letting gesture and glance say what words often can’t. Yet amidst this sorrow, there’s an undercurrent of radical tenderness. Hai’s decision to care for Grazina becomes not just an act of compassion but a reclamation of his own fractured identity. The Emperor of Gladness is a deeply felt meditation on generational trauma, queer identity, and the quiet, transformative power of empathy.

The Emperor of Gladness follows Hai who is nineteen and a college dropout. In the town of East Gladness, Hai is on a bridge about to jump when he sees someone shout across the river. Grazina is the one who shouted and she is an elderly widow with dementia. Grazina invites Hai to live with her and the two develop a powerful bond.

This was so beautiful and I loved it so much. It’s a slow novel that creeps up on you. Ocean Vuong has a real gift when it comes to writing and I have no quotes picked out from this book because the whole book is quotable. Every page drips with emotion and the whole book is just beautiful. This book made me happy and sad at the same time. I really understood Hai and why he did certain things and the bond between Hai and Grazina was beautiful. I also loved the bond between Hai and his coworkers. There was also some subtle dark humour in this which I loved. This author is incredibly talented and I cannot wait to see what he does next. I will definitely buy a physical copy of this and I will recommend this to everyone I know. I feel like I lost part of my soul to this book and I do not know how to properly articulate my feelings. This is definitely a contender for my favourite book of the year.

This was a book I really enjoyed. Both the main characters were so unusual and an unlikely pair but their connection really leaped off the page