GEORGE AND RUE by George Elliott Clarke

I had the pleasure of meeting Canadian author and Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke this year and chatted to him about the skeletons in his family’s closet that led to the writing of this novel based on the deeds of his ancestral cousins. It packs a real punch: variously gruesome, funny, sensuous, and brave.

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.