The Sisters Brothers: A Novel

Patrick de Witt’s dazzlingly original novel is a darkly funny, offbeat Western about a reluctant assassin & his murderous brother.

Oregon, 1851. Eli & Charlie Sisters are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, Charlie makes a lot of money & shoots anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation & falls in love. And they bicker constantly. When the brothers get to California, they discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is strange, sad & utterly gripping.

"The Sisters Brothers frontier is more poetic than realistic but as easy to slip into as the old HBO series Deadwood. But where an onscreen western shows the setting, this book has few descriptions of landscape or buildings they visit. What gets described, instead, are bodily woes. Charlie's bad drunks and worse hangovers include lots of vomiting, Eli has injuries that bleed & swell, & the decline of Tub, Eli's horse, after getting swatted by a grizzly is, in the end, grisly."  -  Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

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Patrick deWitt’s writing career began when he published a short book of ‘random writings & bad advice’, called Help Yourself Help Yourself.  His first novel, Ablutions, was published in 2009. His second, The Sisters Brothers, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize & the Governor General Literary Award. His writing has appeared in several US magazines & anthologies.