Name: The Emperor of Gladness
Price: 50.24 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Ocean Vuong
ISBN: 9781787335400

Type

Physical Book

Author

Ocean Vuong

Publisher

Jonathan Cape Ltd

Year

2025

Language

English

Pages

416

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

24.3cm x 16.5cm

ISBN13

9781787335400

The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong (Author) · Jonathan Cape Ltd · Hardcover

New Book Imported to New Zealand

Delivery: 10 Jul - 16 Jul

NZ$ 50.24

Import costs and 15% GST included in the price ✅

NZ$ 50.24

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Synopsis "The Emperor of Gladness"

Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

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 alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at 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 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.

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

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*

[An] innovative, playful novel’ - Financial Times, Books to Look Out For 2025*

Ocean Vuong

(Author)

View Author's Page

Ocean Vuong (Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, 1988) immigrated to the United States with his family in 1990, after spending a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines. In 2014, he received the Ruth Lilly / Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and with the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the Whiting Award and the Forward Prize in the United States and the T. S. Eliot Prize in England. His texts have been published in outlets such as The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.

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