Even without her name on the submission, it’s not hard to recognize that one is in the prose world of Nhi Mundy. There is a distinct crispness to the sentences. The images are haunting and strange and evocative. The plights of her fully dimensionally characters are moving. Nobody is just one thing or another. Identity, personality, and history are nuanced and complex. These last few years Nhi has embarked on a longer narrative that explores the stories of three generations of a Vietnamese family that settles in America after much violence and trauma. I’ve been deeply impressed with Nhi’s rendering of various past periods and the tonal shifts that accompany them. While providing textured historical backdrops she never fails to attend to the small details that make characters such as a provincial policeman in colonial Vietnam or a depressed immigrant mother barricaded in her bedroom with the television blaring come alive with force and feeling, with context, with human pain. Her trust in specificity, her understanding that we all are all flawed, all chased by demons of our own and other people’s making, and her ability to zoom in and out of lives and chronologies without ever losing connection to felt actuality, have helped her develop into a powerful literary artist.

— Sam Lipsyte, novelist, No One Left to Come Looking for You

Emotionally-rich material, told with authority, and its scope is terrifically impressive — I am engaged on multiple levels. The background, written as historical narrative, as well as the kind of origin-story self-portrait of the narrator, that cuts in between the contextual chapters. Nhi has achieved a superb balance between the background and foreground, so much so that the background feels almost primary, in an intriguing way: a narrative that in some sense is more vivid, and certainly more overtly dramatic, than the current story line. There’s such confidence and skill to the way she has assembled the narrative that to some degree my critical reactions have been disarmed as I found myself immersed in the narrative world and drawn in by the historical, political, and personal dramas she so effortlessly intertwine. It’s just extraordinary work.

— Benjamin Marcus, novelist, Notes from the Fog