The Sisters brothers

deWitt, Patrick 1975- (Author).

Summary: 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.

Record details

ISBN: 0887842895
ISBN: 9781770890329
ISBN: 9780887842894
ISBN: 9780062041265
Physical Description: 328 p. ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Toronto : House of Anansi Press, 2011.

Content descriptions

Awards Note:

2011 Governor General's literary award winner; 2011 Rogers Writers' Trust fiction prize winner; 2011 Scotiabank Giller prize finalist; 2011 Man Booker prize finalist; 2012 Leacock Medal Award for humour writing.