The Emperor of Gladness

The Emperor of Gladness, published by Penguin Press in May 2025 and released in Italy by Guanda as L'imperatore della gioia, is the second novel by Ocean Vuong, the Vietnamese American poet and novelist who had already established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary English-language fiction with his debut, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The novel opens on a late-summer evening in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, where nineteen-year-old Hai, estranged from his Vietnamese immigrant family and secretly addicted to opioids after a failed stint in rehab, stands on the edge of a bridge ready to fall into the pouring rain. He is stopped by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow living alone across the river who, in the grip of advancing dementia, offers him a roof in exchange for daily care.

Out of this encounter grows an unlikely, moving bond, as Hai becomes Grazina's unofficial caretaker, inventing with her an imaginary war game in which the two become heroic fighters against the cruelties of daily life, letting Vuong move between her lucid moments and episodes set in wartime Lithuania. Around this relationship, the novel widens its focus to a community of precarious workers, Hai's coworkers at a fictional fast-food chain called HomeMarket, portraying overlooked America, low wages, immigrant families, unspoken addictions. The style remains unmistakably his own, prose carrying into fiction the imagistic density of his poetry, able to turn small details into images of striking emotional power, built on a more expansive structure than his epistolary debut, framed as a long letter to his mother.

Critics received the book very favorably, praising Vuong's ability to write about brutal subjects, addiction, suicide, dementia, poverty, without slipping into sentimentality, though some noted an ending that felt rushed against the slow pace of the rest of the novel. Chosen as the 114th selection of Oprah's Book Club, the book saw its visibility multiply, reaching the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list and confirming Ocean Vuong as one of the most beloved voices in contemporary American literary fiction.