JULY 2011 - AudioFile
This is one strange novel about two gunfighters in the Old West who are long on ability and short on conscience. Maybe it's because their last name is Sisters, but the two “heroes” of the novel are loyal only to each other. Patrick deWitt's intriguing story of these two greedy men, whom he somehow makes likable, is a fascinating exercise in writing skill. His scenarios are breathtakingly original—no clichés here. John Pruden has just enough of that laid-back cowboy drawl to allow the listener to slip into another time. His pitch-perfect rendition is a wonderful complement to this story about two soldiers of fortune traveling through old Californy during the Gold Rush days. M.S. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
Ron Charles
…[deWitt] rides parallel to the trails of Jack Shaefer, James Carlos Blake and Cormac McCarthy, but he frequently crosses into comic territory to produce a story that's weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness…As the novel runs along, deWitt shifts the story in unpredictable directions, slowing the pace for a surreal finale in the woods that's touched with alchemy.
—The Washington Post
From the Publisher
Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush, is ‘weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness,’ according to Ron Charles.” — Washington Post
“[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own.” — Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011 on Salon.com
“This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western.” — Notable Fiction of 2011, Washington Post
“DeWitt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy inclusion on the shortlist.” — Daily Beast
“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...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.” — Los Angeles Times
“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.” — Esquire
“[T]here’s something cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure.” — Wall Street Journal
“By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.” — NPR.org
“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
“A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon.” — Boston Globe
“Mesmerizing… The book seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt’s subtle, nothing-wasted prose. He writes with gorgeous precision about the grotesque: an amputation, a gouged eye, a con in a dive bar, a nauseating body count [without] macho brutishness.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“DeWitt’s exploitations of the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his comic gifts without ever compromising the novel’s gradual accumulation of darkness, disgust, and foreboding.” — The Millions
“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, bestselling author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Like Tarantino, deWitt knows that attitude makes blood funny; like Twain, he understands a reader’s willingness to forgive a good narrator’s personal flaws.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is full of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third.” — Dallas Morning News
“Original, entrancing and entertaining.” — Denver Post
“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.” — Washington Post
“The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut.” — The Onion AV Club
“Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.” — Outside magazine
“Patrick deWitt’s narrator—a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition—is a brilliant and memorable creation.” — Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Little Children
“A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength.” — Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander
“At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it.” — Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children
“…gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination.” — New York Times Book Review
“A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.” — Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Time Out New York
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.
Washington Post
Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush, is ‘weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness,’ according to Ron Charles.
NPR.org
By turns hilarious, graphic and meditative, The Sisters Brothers hooked me from page one all the way to 300 — and I could have stayed on for many more.
|Los Angeles Times
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...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.
Boston Globe
A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon.
Daily Beast
DeWitt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS is a glorious picaresque Western; everything about this book is stylish, from its conceit to its cover design making it a truly worthy inclusion on the shortlist.
Esquire
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.
Wall Street Journal
[T]here’s something cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure.
Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011 on Salon.com
[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own.
Notable Fiction of 2011
This bloody buddy tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush is weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness — a reaffirmation of the endurance of the Western.
Denver Post
Original, entrancing and entertaining.
New York Times Book Review
…gritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination.
The Millions
DeWitt’s exploitations of the picaresque form are striking, and he has a wonderful way of exercising his comic gifts without ever compromising the novel’s gradual accumulation of darkness, disgust, and foreboding.
The Onion AV Club
The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut.
Wells Tower
A masterful, hilarious picaresque that keeps company with the best of Charles Portis and Mark Twain, The Sisters Brothers is a relentlessly absorbing feat of novelistic art.
Tom Perrotta
Patrick deWitt’s narrator—a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition—is a brilliant and memorable creation.
Gil Adamson
A bright, brutal revision of the Western, The Sisters Brothers offers an unexpected meditation on life, and on the crucial difference between power and strength.
Outside Magazine
Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.
Charles Bock
At once dark and touching, The Sisters Brothers has something on every page to make you laugh. Patrick deWitt has given us a gift, reimagining the old west in a thoroughly original manner. Readers are all the better for it.
David Wroblewski
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.
Dallas Morning News
[THE SISTERS BROTHERS] is full of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... THE SISTERS BROTHERS is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Mesmerizing… The book seduces us to its characters, and draws us on the strength of deWitt’s subtle, nothing-wasted prose. He writes with gorgeous precision about the grotesque: an amputation, a gouged eye, a con in a dive bar, a nauseating body count [without] macho brutishness.
Los Angeles Times
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...[DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.
Wall Street Journal
[T]here’s something cinematic about Mr. deWitt’s unadorned prose style, which at first made this reader do a double-take—can this be serious?—only to continue flicking the pages with pleasure.
Washington Post
Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated tale of two hired guns during the Gold Rush, is ‘weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness,’ according to Ron Charles.
Outside magazine
Funny and strange [and] oddly warm…you’ll find yourself ashamedly pulling for the brothers Sisters like you did for Jules and Vinnie in Pulp Fiction.
Tom Perrotta's Favorite Fiction of 2011 - Salon.com
"[A]n odd gem...that has one of most engaging and thoughtful narrators I’ve come across in a long time....The novel belongs to the great tradition of subversive westerns...but deWitt has a deadpan comic voice and a sneaky philosophical bent that’s all his own."
The Onion A.V. Club
The brothers’ punchily poetic banter and the book’s bracing bursts of violence keep this campfire yarn pulled taut.
Philadelphia City Paper
Cinematic, wry and mannered…. Just as much as THE SISTERS BROTHERS is about a killing, it’s also about the difficulty of holding on to or setting aside all the things a killer has to convince himself of to make his life palatable.
Portland Book Review
Portland author Patrick DeWitt has hit on a sure-fire road to success.
Anniston Star
…quirky and ultimately touching…The Sisters Brothers will seem a cruel romp to some, but Patrick Dewitt has written more than that, leaving in our hands not just a warning about the American Dream but a primer on how to deal with its legacy.
Critical Mob
…a pitch-perfect page-turner…The Sisters Brothers… cleverly refreshes the classic western novel by injecting it with absurdity, offbeat humor, and elements of the picaresque…at once highly entertaining and strangely affecting.
Monday Mag
If you’re looking for an unforgettable western, grab this one.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sharp and wondrous…[a] funny, oddly moving novel.
BookPage
[A] thrilling, smart and surprisingly touching read…visual and visceral…always compelling and surprising.
The Stranger
Patrick deWitt’s latest novel, The Sisters Brothers [evokes]... a feeling you revel in the re-creation of even more than you would enjoy going back to the original experience at its source.
The Faster Times
A rollicking Western adventure…THE SISTERS BROTHERS…is a great success both in the “literary” sense of a beautiful written and emotionally compelling, and in the sense that it is a genuinely badass Western.
Roanoke Times
A wickedly funny and innovative novel.
Austin Chronicle
A twisted delight…Familiar, yes, but never not fresh. Also: creepy and sometimes inscrutable, gory with multiple amputations, rollicking and wistful and roundly winning.
Good Reads
This book is flat-out good times. Sarcastic, drunk, murderous cowboys...sign me up! ....Do yourself a favor and just read it.
Capital Times
…a heck of a lot of fun to read and surprisingly compelling when it ends.
Library Journal
This engrossing novel, set during the gold rush years of the 1850s, begins as a gritty, unapologetic homage to pulp Westerns (with perhaps a nod to Cormac McCarthy as well). In the final pages, however, as the hired guns at the center of the story are forced by circumstances to rethink their lives, the novel turns into something much more philosophical, existential, and extraordinary. The protagonists are two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, widely known for their brutality. They are sent from Oregon City to California to kill an enemy of their boss, the mysterious Commodore. DeWitt (Ablutions) brings the saloons, the ratty frontier towns, and the West itself vividly to life here, and the large cast of colorful characters are skillfully drawn. It's the concluding pages, however, that give the novel its surprising integrity and power. It becomes, in effect, a different kind of novel, profoundly literary, and devoted to serious philosophical meditation. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Westerns and literary fiction.—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Kirkus Reviews
A calmly vicious journey into avarice and revenge.
The unusual title refers to Charlie and Eli Sisters, the latter of whom narrates the novel. The narrative style is flat, almost unfeeling, though the action turns toward the cold-blooded. It's 1851, and the mysterious Commodore has hired the Sisters brothers to execute a man who's turned against him. The brothers start out from their home in Oregon City in search of the equally improbably named Hermann Kermit Warm. The hit has been set up by Henry Morris, one of the Commodore's minions, so the brothers set off for San Francisco, the last-known home of Warm. Along the way they have several adventures, including one involving a bear with an apple-red pelt. A man named Mayfield is supposed to pay them for this rare commodity but instead tries to cheat them, and the brothers calmly shoot four trappers who work for him. Charlie is the more sociopathic of the two, more addicted to women and brandy, while Eli, in contrast, is calmer, more rational, and even shows signs of wanting to give up the murder-for-hire business and settle down. But first, of course, they need to locate Warm. It turns out Morris has thrown in his lot with Warm, a crazed genius who has seemingly discovered a formula that helps locate gold—so much so that he can get in a day what it takes panners a month to glean. When they finally get to the gold-panners, the brothers wind up joining them, removing literally a bucket of gold from the stream. The caustic quality of Warm's formula leads to disaster, however, and Indians show up at an opportune moment to steal the gold.
DeWitt creates a homage to life in the Wild West but at the same time reveals its brutality.
