The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt

May 2011 · House of Anansi

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Not sure what I was expecting when I picked up this book. It is an easy and entertaining read. It gives you a glimpse into the mind of Eli Sisters, whom with his brother Charlie are hired killers traveling the western United States in search of their latest "job".

The story of Sisters Brothers is not developed adequately and it lacks the meat your imagination needs to endeavor and make a mental image to fully engage your attention. The characters are also not very well developed for the reader to relate to. In my opinion the author fails to entertain the readers with a consistently solid story and suffers from a very peculiar sense of humor which only adds to the absurdity of the outcome. His efforts to use symbols to deliver his point also are poorly chosen cliches.

I found “The Brothers Sisters” by Patrick Dewitt to be a fresh and innovative novel. As a Man Booker contender this book was an intimate glimpse into the hard and sometimes brutal Old West of the 1850’s. Two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, embark on a mission to assassinate a marked man. They encounter many difficulties as they navigate their way west, highlighting the distinct differences of the two brothers. I listened to this story on Audio and was hard pressed to step away from this book. It is character driven, with the relationship between the two brothers taking center stage. The narrators voice is poignant which added to the experience of listening. Eli’s intonation and interpretation of events is powerful, stirring, and at times very funny. He is a peculiar character and gets under your skin and stays there long after you’ve finished the book. His voice added a personal dimension I thoroughly enjoyed. This would make an excellent book club choice.

About the author

PATRICK DEWITT is the author of the novels French Exit (an international bestseller and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), The Sisters Brothers (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.