Tags: FICTION
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic’ Guardian
‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve experienced in my lifetime’ Oprah Winfrey
READERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS:
‘Read it slowly. Let it wreck you. Then read it again’
‘I feel like I lost part of my soul to this book’
‘I would give it 6 stars if I could’
‘Sad and funny, devastating and quietly celebratory’
‘A masterwork of compassion and complexity’
College dropout Hai doesn’t know how to face the future until a chance meeting with elderly widow Grazina changes his life.
One late summer evening in the town of East Gladness, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow.
From this moment,