George And Rue
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
By all accounts, the bludgeoning murder in 1949 of a taxi driver by brothers George and Rufus Hamilton was a slug-ugly" crime. George and Rue were hanged for it. Repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, George Elliott Clarke uncovered a story of violence, poverty and shame -- a story that led first to the Governor General’s Award–winning Execution Poems and culminated in Clarke’s brilliant and darkly comic debut novel.
Named an editor’s choice by The Bookseller in the UK, George & Rue is a book about death that brims with fierce vitality and the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke’s writing.
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.
