George & Rue - Hardcover

Clarke, George Elliott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843432609 ISBN 13: 9781843432609

Publisher: Harvill Press, 2005

Synopsis

The facts are clear. It was, by all accounts, a "slug-ugly" crime: in 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer in the dirt-poor settlement of Barker's Point, New Brunswick. Less than eight months later, the brothers were hanged for their crime.

George and Rue's brutal act lives on in New Brunswick over half a century later, where the murder site is still known as "Hammertown". George Elliott Clark draws from this disturbing chapter in Canadian history in his first novel, brilliantly reimagining the lives - and deaths - of the two brothers. Fiercely human and startlingly poignant, George & Rue shifts seamlessly through the killers' pasts, examining just what kind of forces would reduce these men to lives of crime, violence, and ultimately, murder. In this richly evocative and bleakly comic tale, we also come to know the story of an impoverished Africadian community powerless to help its people, and of a white community bent on viewing all blacks as dangerous outsiders.

Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that is the hallmark of George Elliott Clarke's writing, George & Rue is an unforgettable fiction debut.

(2004-10-21)

About this title

About the Author

George Elliott Clarke is a bestselling, award-winning poet, playwright and screenwriter. He is the author of six books of poetry, including WHYLAH FALLS, a 2002 CBC Canada Reads finalist, and EXECUTION POEMS, winner of the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He has just been named the second writer to receive a prestigious Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, an award worth up to $225,000 over three years, similar to the MacArthur Genius Award in the United States. A seventh-generation African-Canadian, Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. Previously an assistant professor of English and Canadian Studies at Duke University, Clarke also served as the Seagrams Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at McGill University. He lives in Toronto, where he is currently the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, but also owns land in Nova Scotia.

From Publishers Weekly

African-Canadian poet Clarke returns to the subject he treated previously in verse (Execution Poems) in this lyrical, original debut novel: the true story of the 1949 murder of a taxi driver in New Brunswick, Canada, by Clarke's first cousins, brothers George and Rufus Hamilton. The author and his characters are descended from African-Americans who immigrated to Nova Scotia at the end of the Revolutionary War, and he spins his tale in "Blackened English." The result is sparkling, powerfully inventive prose. Clarke begins the brothers' story with their impoverished, part black, part Mi'kmaq Indian parents, Asa (a violent "patriarch who felt commissioned to destroy his family") and the beautiful, tawny-skinned Cynthy. For George and Rufus ("just two black boys blackened further by Depression"), this lineage dooms them from birth, if not their very conceptions in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia. George is the simpler brother, willing to make an honest living, while Rufus, the younger brother but the leader, is brighter, more creative and ruthless—he only wants "to plot piano gigs and casual thefts." Petty crime escalates to murder in a desperate hope for cash, and Clarke eloquently plots the Hamiltons' tragic trajectory toward the crime for which they hang.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843432609
• ISBN 13: 9781843432609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240