A young man of privileged upbringing leaves his home in the prosperous north of his island nation to teach in the devastated south, where a civil war festers. Over the course of several months, in which he befriends many of the town’s people and becomes teacher not only to the town’s children but to the enlisted men of the local army station, he loses his faith in and hope for the future. The Unyielding Clamour of the Night is a sympathetic novel that enters the mind and soul of a character to reveal the brutal and lasting affects of acts of violence, and how violence only begets violence.

Neil Bissoondath is the author of two short story collections, Digging Up the Mountains and On The Eve Of Uncertain Tomorrows, and five novels, A Casual Brutality, The Innocence of Age, Doing the Heart Good, The Unyielding Clamour of Night, and The Soul of All Great Designs. His fiction has been nominated for many prizes, including The Guardian Fiction Prize, the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award. He has twice won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and once won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Fiction. His non-fiction book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994) won the Gordon Montador Award.

Originally from Trinidad, Neil now lives in Quebec City with his wife and daughter. He is a professor in the Département des literatures at Université Laval.  

Neil Bissoondath's profile page

• Winner, QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

“With such unpredictable shifting between the literary and metaphorical, Bissoondath’s Unyielding Clamour of the Night bravely tackles issues that evoke great pain.”

Books in Canada

“This finely wrought, detailed novel cannot, obviously, provide answers, but Bissoondath sets out many of the questions that fiction should be exploring in these odd, explosive times. What makes an insurgent? Why do the oppressed go to such extraordinary lengths?”

Quill and Quire

“Though a reader might know from the start where Arun’s journey will lead him, Bissoondath’s narrative, studded with hard kernels of moral ambiguity and a shocking, open-ended conclusion, still has the power to haunt.”

Publishers’ Weekly

“Fully-realised characters, a situation that is only too believable, and writing full of beauty and anguish. Neil Bisoondath has excelled himself. The Unyielding Clamour of the Night is a novel of humanity and wisdom by a novelist at the height of his powers.”

Montreal Review of Books