Join us May 20 at Sons & Daughters Winery for an evening with Vinh Nguyen, in conversation with Jolie Phuong Hoang about his compelling memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse.
Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, and the Hilary Weston-Writers Trust prize for Nonfiction. It was named a best book of 2025 by NPR, CBC Books, The Hill Times, The Grind, and The Soapberry Review.
Held at Sons & Daughters Winery in Pelham, a $45 ticket includes a glass of wine or beer. Non-alcoholic options will also be available. Additional beverages may be purchased.
Guests also have the option to purchase a charcuterie in a cup (vegetarian and vegan options available upon request; orders must be placed in advance).
6:45PM Doors open
7:30PM Author Conversation begins
8:30PM Book Signing begins
Someday Books will be onsite selling books.
A $20 tax receipt is included in your ticket purchase.
Please note tickets are non-refundable.
Tickets can be purchased at all LPPL branches and online.
Thanks to our generous sponsors including:
Meridian
Niagara Peninsula Energy
Sons & Daughters Winery
About the Book
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 was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.
Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives.
About the Author
Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator. His writing has appeared in Brick, LitHub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Ricepaper, The Criterion Collection, and MUBI 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 author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, which won Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Shelly Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies from the American Studies Association. He is also co-editor of two academic volumes: Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.
In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. In 2024, he was a writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House. Vinh was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and lives in Toronto, Canada.
The Books on the Bench Author Series is a major library fundraiser. All funds raised support programs and services.