The Emperor of Gladness

The Emperor of Gladness is a novel by the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, published in 2025. Penguin Press issued it in the United States and Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom.

Hai is nineteen and living in East Gladness, a post-industrial town in Connecticut, when he goes out to a bridge in the rain intending to end his life. A voice from the far bank stops him: Grazina is an elderly widow whose dementia is getting worse, and she needs somebody. Before long he is her caretaker, and the two of them spend a year in each other's company in an arrangement that changes how he sees himself, his family and the town they are both living in.

Vuong has said that he drew on his own experience of service work and of caring for the elderly, and that he wanted to write against the idea that a life is worth telling only if it ends in wealth.