“Beautifully and brilliantly rendered, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse chronicles and questions with self-searching honesty and painstaking authenticity at every turn. Its pungent imagery grasps at what eludes fathoming, while the depth of feeling and rumination pierce the reader’s heart and mind … There are no analogies for loss and pain. The book rings true because of its approximations and fabulations. This memoir of loss is, in fact, a gift” - Kerri Sakamoto, Canadian Literature

"The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a significant memory work that details Nguyen’s life far from Vietnam, marked by the ghost of his father. His imagery and descriptions shift between the tenderness of what he remembers of Vietnam and also the reality of what he and his family endured after they fled, while also navigating the present and offering a historical record of a place just outside his memories." - BookPage

"Nguyen’s writing is nothing short of masterful, the imagery stunning ... His world is not one of dappled light, but of dappled shadows. It is a work of psychological depth and insight, the work of an artist who looks deeper and deeper as he sifts through the material of his life." - Winnipeg Free Press

"Nguyen stretches memoir conventions to their breaking point in this audacious, partly fictional meditation on his war-torn family history. Uncertainty about the facts is no match for the author's piercing imagination and poetic sensibility. - Publishers Weekly

“Boldly denying readers easy catharsis … [Nguyen] nimbly transports readers to a blurry past and immerses them in the biographical ambiguities of life as a refugee. It’s a worthy experiment.”  - Publishers Weekly

"Lyrical . . . Poignantly embodies a life marked by an unsatisfiable longing."  - Kirkus Reviews

“An innovative account that ... traces Nguyen’s quest to revive a missing parent and investigates his shifting identity. [An] artful response [to the question] what happened to his father.” - Literary Review of Canada

“Dreamlike and urgent, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse captures a family history perforated by mystery, where there is no hard boundary between the real and the remembered, the present and the past, filial devotion and writerly betrayal. Every page of this ingenious book, written with tender artistry, filled me with wonder but what lingers is the unexpected love story at its core—the tale of a mother and son, committed to holding, knowing, and enlarging one another. Nguyen is a magical, dazzling writer. This book is a marvel.”

“Blazingly brilliant.” - Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife

“Guided by invention and memory, creation and fidelity, this unforgettable book puts words to what is lost and what survives, while existing, somehow, within all that cannot be salvaged by language. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a work of extraordinary grace and beauty.” - Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“In Vinh Nguyen’s tour de force memoir, crafted with fierce emotional intelligence and heartbreaking vulnerability, the past is a parallel world where his family can be made whole again. From actual journeys, like his quixotic return to a Thai refugee camp with the aid of social media, to the poignantly fabulistic flights courtesy of fiction’s alternative maps, here is a writer forthrightly reaching for all the survival tools available to him. In this homecoming of the self, Nguyen travels through doubt and desire to arrive at the terra firma of the here and now.” - Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt

"Gorgeous and searching, mournful and luminescent, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a salve and a map. Nguyen has written a gorgeous meditation on being, remembering, and becoming: a stunning work through and through." - Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal