The Sisters Brothers (out of print)

Stella pointed me in the direction of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. The author is well-named; this western is laugh-out-loud funny. The brothers are headed for disaster from the beginning, and the understated portrayal of their ongoing failure is an absolute joy to read. - Tim

I thoroughly enjoyed The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. This is western meets disaster (- actually I reckon most westerns are melancholic melodrama); a story of violence and delightful understatements. It made me think of Coen brothers' film True Grit. - Stella

Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Then they get to California, and discover that Warm is an inventor who has come up with a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad.

Told in deWitt's darkly comic and arresting style, The Sister Brothers is the kind of Western the Coen Brothers might write - stark, unsettling and with a keen eye for the perversity of human motivation. Like his debut novel Ablutions, The Sister Brothers is a novel about the things you tell yourself in order to be able to continue to live the life you find yourself in, and what happens when those stories no longer work. It is an inventive and strange and beautifully controlled piece of fiction, which shows an exciting expansion of deWitt's range.

Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011.