Sisters Brothers (Booker'11 Shortlist)

“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.”—Los Angeles Times

“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

“A feast of delights. . . . Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny.”—Boston Globe

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 the complex and compelling Eli, 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.