Will I love The Emperor of Gladness?

What struck me most about this story was the sheer drama and miracle of its opening scene.

A nineteen-year-old boy stands on a bridge in the pouring rain, ready to end his life. An old woman's voice cuts through the storm and saves him. That moment stunned me.

The idea that someone living inside the fog of dementia could pierce through a young man's darkness felt like a small miracle. And as the two fall into a strange, tender daily rhythm, each giving the other exactly what they lack, their unlikely friendship becomes even more extraordinary.

It moved me because… show more.

Ocean Vuong's writing is poetic, which stands to reason as he was first a poet before he turned to fiction. His characters are eccentric, raw, unpretentious, often inelegant, blue collar, sometimes autistic, gender fluid, one has dementia. Life at its most fundamental. Vuong is an immigrant and writes with deep sensitivity about the experience of outsiders, like his main character Hai. But every character in the book is an outsider.