Book 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.
George Elliott Clarke is an award-winning poet, playwright and
screenwriter. He is the author of the novel
Whylah Falls
and six collections of poetry and a winner of the Governor General's
Award in 2001. A seventh-generation African Canadian, Clarke was born in
Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the community of Three Mile Plains. He is an
associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
