The Sisters Brothers - by Patrick DeWitt (Paperback)

About the Book

""The Sisters Brothers" is dark, dark, and funny, both ha ha and strange, but it's a lot more, too, a lyrical meditation on work and love from a narrator who moves from thoughtful conviction to casual murder as seamlessly as this book flows over the page . . . A winner."--Tom Franklin, author of "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter."

Book Synopsis

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, JOHN C. REILLY AND JOAQUIN PHOENIX

A BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

From the Back Cover

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

Review Quotes

"[T]here's something cinematic about Mr. deWitt's unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take--can this be serious?--only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure." - Wall Street Journal

"DeWitt's THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy inclusion on the shortlist." - Aislinn Sarnacki, Bangor Daily News

"DeWitt's exploitations of the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his comic gifts without ever compromising the novel's gradual accumulation of darkness, disgust, and foreboding." - The Millions

"Like Tarantino, deWitt knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader's willingness to forgive a good narrator's personal flaws." - Cleveland Plain Dealer

"This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness -- a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western." - Ron Charles, Washington Post

"[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I've come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that's all his own." - Tom Perrotta, Salon.com

"[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is full of surprises, among them...is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt's second novel...and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third." - Dallas Morning News

"...gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic...DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive...it's very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination." - New York Times Book Review

"Patrick deWitt's narrator--a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition--is a brilliant and memorable creation." - Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Little Children

"Thrilling...[deWitt] unspools a lushly voiced picaresque story...a kind of True Grit told by Tom Waits...so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry." - Esquire

"If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt's bloody, darkly funny western THE SISTERS BROTHERS...This novel has little in common with DeWitt's first, "Ablutions," a fits-and-starts telling of a contemporary Hollywood bartender in disastrous decline. He has shifted here radically, successfully, to an entirely different time period, from a tale of solitude to brotherhood, from self-erasure to becoming more human. The only thing the books share is a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages." - Los Angeles Times

"A gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir....Honestly, I can't recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths." - David Wroblewski, bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

"A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength." - Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander

"Funny and strange [and] oddly warm...you'll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction." - Outside magazine

"At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it." - Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children

"The brothers' punchily poetic banter and the book's bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut." - The Onion AV Club

"Original, entrancing and entertaining." - Denver Post

"Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt's steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet's heart and an acute sense of gallows humor...the reader is likely to reach the adventure's end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride." - Time Out New York

"By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 -- and I could have stayed on for many more." - NPR.org

"Weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness... It's all rendered irresistible by Eli Sisters, who narrates with a mixture of melancholy and thoughtfulness." - Washington Post

"A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn't about to ride off into the sunset any time soon." - Boston Globe

"Mesmerizing... The book seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt's subtle, nothing-wasted prose. He writes with gorgeous precision about the grotesque: an amputation, a gouged eye, a con in a dive bar, a nauseating body count [without] macho brutishness." - Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art." - Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned