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.
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.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — May 14, 2011 |
| Specifications | 344 pages | 6.02 in x 9.01 in |
| Keywords | revenge; chase; adventure; goldrush; san francisco; american west; award winning author; french exit; undermajordomo minor; murder; assasins; buddy comedy; historical fiction; saga; book club pick; canlit; disaster artist; molly's game; gifts for dad; fathers day; book club; |
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| Written By |
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, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Leacock Medal for Humour, 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. |
| Written By |
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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, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Leacock Medal for Humour, 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. |
Short-listed, Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2011
Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize, 2011
Winner, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, 2011
Winner, Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction, 2011
Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Editors' Pick, 2011
Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Canadian Fiction, 2011
Commended, Publishers Weekly Best Book, 2011
Commended, Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, 2011
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The Sisters Brothers confirms Patrick deWitt as one of the most talented young writers around.” —Sunday Times
“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
“[Patrick] DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and perhaps unexpectedly, moving.” —Publishers Weekly
“. . . a lushly voiced picaresque story . . . It's a kind of True Grit told by Tom Waits.” —Esquire
“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
“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
“. . . gritty . . . deadpan . . . very comedic . . . opens new doors in the imagination.” —New York Times Book Review