The Emperor of Gladness

One rainy evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands at the edge of a bridge, ready to end his life — until a voice calls out from across the river. It belongs to Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow slipping into dementia, alone in a house in a neighborhood the world has left behind. She talks him down, and, with nowhere else to go, Hai stays on as her caretaker.

Over the following year, an improbable bond forms between them, built out of small daily acts of care, half-remembered histories, and the stories they tell to survive. Hai takes a job at a fast-food restaurant among a crew of the overlooked and the barely-getting-by, wrestles with addiction and with what he owes his own struggling family, and finds in Grazina an unlikely tether to the world.

Ocean Vuong's tender, lyrical novel is a portrait of chosen family and working-class American life — an unhurried, deeply felt story about care, memory, and the fragile business of staying alive.