George & Rue
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
The facts are clear. It was, by all accounts, a "slug-ugly" crime: in 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton, two African Canadians, 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.
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.
