The Sisters Brothers [Kindle Edition]

Patrick deWitt (Author)

Book Description

“A gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir…Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths.”
—David Wroblewski, New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain…a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.”
—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

“The Sisters Brothers is dark, dark, and funny, both ha ha and strange…and you’ll love the characters you meet along the way.”
—Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Patrick deWitt, a young writer whose “stop-you-in-your-tracks writing has snuck up on the world” (Los Angeles Times), brings us The Sisters Brothers, a darkly comic, outrageously inventive novel that offers readers a decidedly off-center view of the Wild, Wild West.  Set against the back-drop of the great California Gold Rush, this odd and wonderful tour de force at once honors and reshapes the traditional western while chronicling the picaresque misadventures of two hired guns, the fabled Sisters brothers. The most original western since the Coen Brothers re-interpreted True Grit—you’ve never met anyone quite like The Sisters Brothers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving. (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

“Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 494 KB
• Print Length: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; Reprint edition (April 26, 2011)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004CFA91Y
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,980 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #81 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Westerns
  • #97 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Humor

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

203 of 209 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hired Guns April 26, 2011

By William Kennedy

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Where to begin? The Sisters Brothers is without a doubt one of the most original and engaging books I've picked up in awhile. After reading, and thoroughly enjoying Mr. DeWitt's debut novel "Ablutions," I was looking forward to reading this.

"Ablutions" is a brief fantastic story of a barman who works at a downtown LA dive. Told in the second person, it mines similar terrority as Denis Johnson and Bukowski, but with a fresh and inventive narrative. For some reason, I expected "The Sisters Brothers" to be more of the same. Another tale of the down and out, the hopeless and deranged. Patrick DeWitt has grown leaps and bounds since his debut and gives us something unique - a good old fashioned Western that rips along like a horse set loose from the corral for the first time in years.

This novel bends genres and acheives something greater than just being a Western. In fact, the story itself is something universal, it just happens to be set during the early days of the gold rush.

Eli and Charlie Sisters are two hired guns sent to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. They don't question why he has to die, they simply follow orders. The journey to find Warm is a large portion of the book and allows us the chance to see how different Eli and Charlie are from each other. Charlie is brutal and selfish, a cold hearted killer with vicious instincts, while Eli is a bit softer, open to the beauty in life - or at least the possibility of finding happiness someday.

Eli narrates the story with thoughtful observations and through him we begin to understand the complicated relationship between the two brothers.

I read this book in a storm over two nights. Novels often fall into two categories, at least as far as reviewers are concerned - the literary, and the genre books. Literary means difficult and serious while genre (mysteries, sci-fi, paranormal, romance etc.) are easy and mindless reads. Of course, this is not always the case but it is a hard stigma to fight. What Mr. DeWitt does is completely ignore whatever classification his novel may be given, and tells us a ripping good story full of humor, violence, and heart. Charlie Sisters knows a little something about the way of the world and how greedy and selfish people are at their core. To find a way to be someone different in the midst of all that is Eli's goal, and Mr. DeWitt takes us right along with him.

I loved this book. I loved the way it was told and the way it made me feel. Highly recommended for anyone and everyone who enjoys great fiction.

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Run-amuck Imagination April 26, 2011

By Grant Barber

Format:Hardcover

This deWitt is someone to watch out for. Liked his first, Abulutions, although I had an acquaitance going through the DTs and rehab just about the time it came out; deWitt was a bit too spot on for me, given the timing. Now here comes a book that...well...how do people come up with this wildly imaginative, unique, witty characters, plotting, tone? The novel is episodic, but hangs together well. There is a bit of archetypal skeleton under the book: quest into new territory by protagonist(s), allowing for new experiences, encounters, growth into self, some moral decisions to be made, and then return in the aftermath. There is a fun-house hall of mirrors similarity here to McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. This novel is darkly comedic though. I've hit a string of books recently that have had interesting style, but predictable plot...once you get down the literary tricks and style (when I start a book I like to immerse myself into it...read the first 1/3 to 1/2), no need it seems to finish; just read the last couple of pages to confirm what you already suspected. Not here. Great wedding of plot to style to imaginative twists and turns. The book gets even stronger as you go along. One of the highlights of the year so far in reading for me. If deWitt has staying power he'll be his own version of Delillo or Stanley Elkins; I really, really hope this is so.

90 of 102 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, Entertaining, But Not for Everyone July 13, 2011

By Just My Op VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The Sisters brothers are a couple of hired killers, not much bothered by pesky scruples, and are employed by a man with even fewer scruples. They are headed to Gold Rush country in the 1850s, sent to kill a thief, no questions asked.

Eli, the less violent of the two, tells us his story, and does it in wonderful, formal language of the times. I really liked Eli despite his considerable shortcomings.

As advertised, this book is filled with some very dark humor and terrific, quirky characters. I really enjoyed reading about the brothers' travails, about Eli's very enthusiastic introduction to toothbrushes and toothpowders, his almost compulsive desire to get rid of his money, and his attempts at romance.

Given that, if you are an animal, you don't want to be anywhere near the Sister brothers - it is a given that things will go horribly wrong. I really, really liked Tub, a long-suffering horse. Don't get me wrong: people don't fare any better, and there is more than enough gruesome description to go around. It's just that I really, really hate to read about animal cruelty so that unexpected theme knocked off a star for me. All in all, if you are very sensitive to reading about bad things happening to good animals even when you know it's fiction, you might want to skip this one. For everyone else, it is a fun, odd, escapist read.

Thank you to ECCO for giving me an uncorrected proof copy of this book.

More About the Author

Patrick deWitt was born in 1975 on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently resides with his wife and son. He has worked as a laborer, a clerk, a dishwasher, and a bartender. Ablutions is his first novel.