George & Rue

Clarke, George Elliott

ISBN 10: 0002255391 / ISBN 13: 9780002255394

Published by Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., Toronto, 2005

About this Item

Original beige 1/4 paper over paper covered boards with gilt lettering. Pictorial dustjacket features photo of two black men, with white and cream lettering. In his first novel, Clarke draws on the true crime story of his cousins, George and Rufus, bludgeoning a cab driver to death in 1949 in Barkers Point, New Brunswick. They were hanged. Clarke examines the socioeconomic factors that may have led two Black men from Nova Scotia to commit murder. 223 pp. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 014387

Bibliographic Details

• Title: George & Rue
• Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., Toronto
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0002255391
• ISBN 13: 9780002255394
• Binding: Paper Covered Boards
• Illustrator: B & W Photos
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

IT WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, a “slug-ugly” crime. Brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, in a robbery gone wrong, drunkenly bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer. It was 1949, and the two siblings, part Mi’kmaq and part African, were both hanged in Fredericton for the killing. 
    Those facts are also skeletons in George Elliott Clarke’s family closet. Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, Clarke set out to discover just what kind of forces would reduce men to crime, violence and, ultimately, murder. His findings took shape in the 2001 Governor General’s Award–winning Execution Poems and culminates brilliantly in George & Rue. The novel shifts seamlessly back into the killers’ pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too shamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders.
    George & Rue is a book about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humour. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke’s writing, here is a literary debut that will be marked by celebration—and controversy.

About the Author

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

is an award-winning poet, playwrightand screenwriter. He is the author of six books of poetry, including WhylahFalls, a 2002 CBC Canada Reads finalist, and Execution Poems, winnerof the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Clarke was born in Windsor,Nova Scotia, near the black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. He nowlives in Toronto, where he is currently the E. J. Pratt Professor of CanadianLiterature at the University of Toronto, but also owns land in Nova Scotia. Hewas recently awarded the Trudeau Fellowship.