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Description
Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Prix des libraires du Quebec and the Stephen Leacock Medal. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother’s penchant for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. On the road to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside San Francisco — and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse — Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he's sworn to do.
Patrick deWitt, acclaimed author of Ablutions, doffs his hat to the classic Western, and then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West — and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love.
Awards
- Long-listed, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
- Winner, Prix des libraires du Quebec
- Winner, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal
- Winner, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award
- Winner, CBA Libris Award: Fiction Book of the Year
- Short-listed, Google Play International Author of the Year
- Short-listed, CBC Bookie Awards: Literary Fiction
- Short-listed, Walter Scott Prize
- Winner, Oregon Book Awards: Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
- Short-listed, CBA Libris Award: Author of the Year
- Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
- Winner, Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction
- Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Canadian Fiction
- Commended, Publishers Weekly Best Book
- Commended, Quill and Quire Book of the Year
- Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Editors' Pick
- Short-listed, Man Booker Prize for Fiction
- Commended, Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
- Winner, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
- Commended, Toronto Star Reviewers' Top 100 Books
- Commended, Maclean's Magazine Best Books
- Commended, A LitHub Best Book of the Decade Runner-Up
- Commended, An Amazon.ca Best Books Editors’ Pick
- Commended, An Indigo Best Book of the Decade
- Commended, An Amazon.ca Best Books: Canadian Fiction
- Winner, Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award: Fiction Book of the Year
Editorial Reviews
Okay, so it does take a Canadian to write a truly great Western novel of daunting, surrealist panache and rooted in unwavering empathy — and that just about sums up the dark, profound achievement which is The Sisters Brothers.
— Irish Times
There never was a more engaging pair of psychopaths than Charlie and Eli Sisters . . . So subtle is deWitt’s prose, so slyly note-perfect his rendition of Eli’s voice in all its earnestly charming nineteenth-century syntax, and so compulsively readable his bleakly funny Western noir story, that readers will stick by Eli even as he grinds his heel into the shattered skull of an already dead prospector.
— Maclean's
The Sisters Brothers confirms Patrick deWitt as one of the most talented young writers around.
— Sunday Times
. . . gritty . . . deadpan . . . very comedic . . . opens new doors in the imagination.
— New York Times Book Review
Fresh, hilariously anti-heroic, often genuinely chilling, and relentlessly compelling. Yes, this is a mighty fine read, and deWitt a mighty fine writer.
— National Post
A powerfully realized work of narrative fiction . . . the dialogue is sharp as a whip . . . the novel works artfully within its formal boundaries to explore the nature of brotherhood, work, love, greed, loneliness, and personal renewal.
— Times Literary Supplement
. . . a lushly voiced picaresque story . . . It's a kind of True Grit told by Tom Waits.
— Esquire
The Sisters Brothers is a bold, original and powerfully compelling work, grounded in well-drawn characters and a firm hold on narrative. When they say “They don’t write em like that anymore,” they’re wrong.
— Globe and Mail
The Sisters Brothers is a bloody, nightmarish frontier road trip that seems at times like something out of Cormac McCarthy, yet somehow merges laughter and hope with suffering, death and betrayal. [...] Like an alchemist, deWitt has refined and purified the base metals of black comedy and the western to produce literary gold.
— Winnipeg Free Press
[Patrick] DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and perhaps unexpectedly, moving.
— Publishers Weekly
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 . . . After capturing the fireside camps and saloons in perfectly drawn vignettes, deWitt strips these two lethal brothers of more than they ever thought a man could lose. And then, damned if he doesn’t surprise us again with a twilight scene that’s just miraculously lovely.
— Washington Post
I doubt very much I'll read a funnier, more original book than this picaresque, Wild West tale . . . a terrifically spun yarn . . . masterfully strange and wonderful . . .
— Toronto Star
. . . imaginative and ebullient . . . revels in the hilarious life and times of two gunslingers, Eli and Charlie Sisters.
— Boston Globe
