On the Same Page: The Sisters Brothers :: SFPL :: San Francisco Public Library Mobile

by Patrick deWitt

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 a complex and compelling narrator, 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.

About The Author

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two novels, Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers.

Reviews

“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

“Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.” -Time Out New York

"Downright cinematic... deliciously original and rhapsodically funny." -Boston Globe

"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... It's smooth and seamless, shot through with dark humor, pared and antique without being Baroque... There is something very human in all this blood and guts... This humanness, with the humanness that Eli is growing into, give the novel a warmth and depth... DeWitt has shifted here radically, successfully... a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages." -Los Angeles Times