Literary Fiction spotlight
The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
A nineteen-year-old and an eighty-two-year-old widow keep each other alive in a forgotten Connecticut town.
Buy the book
One late-summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge - and is called back by an old woman on the opposite shore.
Publisher's blurb
Synopsis
Hai, adrift and lying to his mother about medical school, moves in as caretaker to Grazina, a widow with dementia who mistakes the present for wartime Lithuania. Around them Vuong assembles a fast-food crew, a cousin chasing a wrestling career, and a town where the factories left and the opioids stayed. It is a novel about labour, care work and the improvised families that form when institutions withdraw.
The editorial feature
Vuong's second novel is looser and more populated than On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the crowdedness suits him. The kitchen-shift scenes are quietly extraordinary - comedy and exhaustion held in the same sentence. Prose that occasionally reaches too far, in a book generous enough to carry it.
Book details
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Released
- 13 May 2025
- Publisher
- Penguin Press
- Featured on
- 13 May 2025
Where to buy
The Emperor of Gladness is available from these retailers.
Related spotlights
All spotlights →
Literary Fiction
4.5Dream Count
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Four women, three continents, and the private accounting each of them keeps of the life they meant to have.
Released 4 March 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.4We Do Not Part
by Han Kang
A writer travels through a blizzard to save a friend's bird, and walks into the buried history of Jeju Island.
Released 21 January 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.3Flesh
by David Szalay
From a Hungarian housing estate to Mayfair money, a life told almost entirely in what its owner will not say.
Released 3 April 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.1Theft
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Three young Tanzanians come of age as tourism, NGOs and old family debts rearrange Zanzibar around them.
Released 18 March 2025
Read spotlight →