Book Talk | Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen

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ABOUT THE BOOK

An unconventional memoir of conjuring the uncertain past and a long-lost homeland, and a vital document of one family’s journey through world history

With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and the lives that could have been. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this powerful memoir is timelier and more important than ever, illuminating the stories, real and imagined, that become buried in the rubble of war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the coeditor of the academic books Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and the author of Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, MONIQUE TRUONG came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is co-written with Thai Nguyen and illustrated by Dung Ho. With Barbara Tran and Khoi Luu, she co-edited Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition(Texas Tech University Press/DVAN Series, 2023). A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors.