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 for the killing. Those facts are also skeletons in George Elliott Clarke's family closet. Both repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins' deeds, which he only learned about from his mother shortly before her death, 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 and 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 and Rue is a book about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humour. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that defines Clarke's writing, it is a remarkable literary debut.

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.

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