A new edition published to coincide with the release of the major motion picture adaptation directed by Palme d’Or-winner Jacques Audiard and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, and John C. Reilly.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Stephen Leacock Medal, and now a major motion picture, The Sisters Brothers is a violent, lustful, hung-over, and hilarious odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother’s penchant for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. On the road to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside Sacramento — and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse — Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he’s sworn to do.

Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Patrick deWitt doffs his hat to the classic Western, and then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West — and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love. With over 150,000 copies sold in Canada alone, this new edition coincides with the release of the novel’s film adaptation directed by Palme d’Or-winner Jacques Audiard and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, and John C. Reilly.

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Stephen Leacock Medal, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Patrick deWitt's profile page

• Commended, A Quill & Quire Book of the Year
• Winner, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal
• Short-listed, CBA Libris Award: Author of the Year
• Short-listed, GOOGLE PLAY™ International Author of the Year Finalist
• Short-listed, Man Booker Prize for Fiction
• Short-listed, Walter Scott Prize
• Winner, Governor General’s Literary Award
• Winner, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
• Commended, A Toronto Star Reviewers’ Top 100 Book
• Commended, An Indigo Best Book of the Decade
• Commended, International Bestseller
• Winner, Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award: Fiction Book of the Year
• Commended, An Amazon.ca Best Books Editors’ Pick
• Commended, An Amazon.ca Best Books: Canadian Fiction
• Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Commended, A LitHub Best Book of the Decade Runner-Up
• Short-listed, CBC Bookie Awards: Literary Fiction
• Commended, A Maclean’s Magazine Best Book
• Winner, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award
• Winner, Oregon Book Awards: Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
• Commended, A Publishers Weekly Best Book
• Commended, A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
• Commended, An Independent Best Book of the Decade

Okay, so it does take a Canadian to write a truly great Western novel of daunting, surrealist panache and rooted in unwavering empathy — and that just about sums up the dark, profound achievement which is The Sisters Brothers.

Irish Times

There never was a more engaging pair of psychopaths than Charlie and Eli Sisters . . . So subtle is deWitt’s prose, so slyly note-perfect his rendition of Eli’s voice in all its earnestly charming nineteenth-century syntax, and so compulsively readable his bleakly funny Western noir story, that readers will stick by Eli even as he grinds his heel into the shattered skull of an already dead prospector.

Maclean's

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 . . . After capturing the fireside camps and saloons in perfectly drawn vignettes, deWitt strips these two lethal brothers of more than they ever thought a man could lose. And then, damned if he doesn’t surprise us again with a twilight scene that’s just miraculously lovely.

Washington Post

The Sisters Brothers confirms Patrick deWitt as one of the most talented young writers around.

Sunday Times

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

Fresh, hilariously anti-heroic, often genuinely chilling, and relentlessly compelling. Yes, this is a mighty fine read, and deWitt a mighty fine writer.

National Post

The Sisters Brothers is a bold, original, and powerfully compelling work, grounded in well-drawn characters and a firm hold on narrative. When they say, ‘They don’t write ’em like that anymore,’ they’re wrong

Globe and Mail