The Sisters Brothers is a 2011 Western novel by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt. The darkly comic story takes place in Oregon and California in 1851. The narrator, Eli Sisters, and his brother Charlie are assassins tasked with killing Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious prospector who has been accused of stealing from the Sisters' fearsome boss, the Commodore. Eli and Charlie experience a series of misadventures while tracking down Warm which resemble the narrative form of a picaresque novel, and the chapters are, according to one review, "slightly sketched-in, dangerously close to a film treatment."[1]
In 1851, Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of assassins of minor repute, are hired by a wealthy businessman known only as "the Commodore" to travel from Oregon City to California in order to murder a gold rushprospector named Hermann Kermit Warm, who is described to them as a "thief". Hard-nosed, plainspoken Charlie, more impulsive and aggressive than his younger brother Eli, has a fondness for binge drinking and appears remorseless about the crimes he commits. Eli, contemplative and often sentimental, admires and looks up to Charlie but finds himself at odds with Charlie's apparent nonchalance about the directions their lives are taking. The brothers bicker constantly about money, the job, their horses, and each other's personalities.
As they ride south, Eli and Charlie encounter many strange characters and endure a series of mishaps and adventures. Eli is first bitten by a spider and then must have a tooth removed, for which he is given morphine to numb the pain; his horse is attacked by a grizzly bear but survives despite a serious eye injury. Charlie frequently gets drunk and is too sick to ride the following morning, slowing their progress to California, which frustrates Eli. The pair hears rumors on the trail about a female bear with a uniquely red-colored pelt, for which a hefty reward has been offered by a man named Mayfield.
Entering California, the brothers unexpectedly spot the bear and Charlie kills it, and they decide to bring it to Mayfield, who runs an inn in a town named after him. After being paid, Charlie insists they stay a night in Mayfield's hotel; Eli sleeps with the hotel's bookkeeper. Waking the next morning, they discover the red bear pelt is missing and suspect Mayfield will accuse them of stealing it. The brothers sneak to the stable to retrieve their horses and flee town, but a group of surly fur trappers who work for Mayfield stop them and demand they return the cash they were paid for the pelt. Charlie and Eli simultaneously dispatch these enemies with well-placed gunshots, and Charlie feels compelled to kill an innocent stable boy to eliminate eyewitnesses. Returning to the hotel, they reach a deal with Mayfield, allowing him to leave in search of an old enemy, a man whom they both know to be dead. As per their end of the deal, the brothers keep the majority of his enormous cache of gold and hiding a large amount of it behind the hotel's stove for safekeeping while they leave to finish their business with Hermann Warm.
Eli and Charlie reach San Francisco and seek out an acquaintance named Morris, whom the Commodore had instructed to keep track of Warm until the Sisters brothers arrived. Morris has disappeared, though, and the brothers must coerce the proprietor of his hotel to hand over Morris' journal. The journal reveals that Morris was approached by Warm, who has concocted an ingenious chemical formula that causes gold to glow brilliantly, making it highly useful for indicating the location of placer deposits in riverbeds. Warm demonstrated his formula to Morris and offered him a partnership in it, and the two have since teamed up to travel to the "River of Light", where they hope to test large quantities of it. Eli and Charlie realize then that the Commodore has duped them: Warm is not a thief but had simply refused to share his formula with the Commodore. Though Charlie wants to see the job done as intended, Eli hesitates to murder an innocent man, but they eventually agree to ride out to Warm's claim and finish the job, which Eli vows will be his last for the Commodore.
When they finally track Morris and Warm to their camp along a remote river, Warm at first catches them off-guard, knowing they were sent to kill him. But the prospectors do not retaliate, and Eli and Charlie likewise earn Warm's trust by defending the camp from a gang of curious bandits. Soon the four men decide to join forces in the prospecting operation. Warm's gold-finding formula, however, proves severely caustic, and both Morris and Warm are already suffering burns to their skin from having exposed their legs to the chemical while wading in the contaminated river. The four partners wait for nightfall to pour the formula into the river and collect as many illuminated gold fragments as possible before the glow fades away. Charlie spills some of the raw formula on his shooting hand and finds it too painful to use, but the men manage to extract a fortune in gold from the riverbed. Morris then falls into the river and Warm dives in to rescue him; both men are severely burned and die from exposure the following day. While the brothers wait for Warm to die so he can be given a proper burial, a party of Indians stumbles upon the camp and robs the men of their money and the gold they had collected. Eli realizes that no one but Warm knew how to make the formula.
The Sisters brothers slowly make their way back to Oregon City, stopping in Mayfield on the way, only to discover the entire town burned down and the gold bullion they had hidden there missing. Mayfield's whores gang up on the brothers and rob them of their little remaining money and pistols. Charlie's burned hand is eventually amputated, and Eli nurses him back to health. Profoundly distressed by the experience, Charlie's former confidence and fearlessness are now gone. Eli, too, is uncertain what to do with himself, but sets out first to break the endless cycle of killers hired by the Commodore by killing him instead. He finds the Commodore soliloquizing in a bathtub in his mansion and drowns him. Now free of their life of crime, the brothers return to their mother's house, where she welcomes them to stay.
In the year of its release, the book was declared a winner at the 75th Governor General's Literary Awards,[3] held by the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the winner of the $25,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize awarded by the Writers' Trust of Canada.[4] The book also won the 2012 Stephen Leacock Medal from The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for humour writing, and was announced as the winner of the award for Best Fiction at the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards. It also won the 2012 Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction.[5] Additionally, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the 2011 ScotiabankGiller Prize,[6] and the 2012 Walter Scott Prize.[7]The Sisters Brothers was number one on Amazon.ca's Best Books of 2011: Top 100 Editors' Picks list[8] and, according to Amazon.ca, was the top-selling fiction book in Canada for the week ending December 11, 2011.[9]
Related Research Articles
James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Bernice Rubens was a Welsh novelist. She became the first woman to win the Booker Prize in 1970, for The Elected Member.
The Matt Cohen Award is an award given annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada to a Canadian writer, in honour of a distinguished lifetime contribution to Canadian literature. First presented in 2000, it was established in memory of Matt Cohen, a Canadian writer who died in 1999.
This is a list of recipients and nominees of the Governor General's Awards award for English-language poetry. The award was created in 1981 when the Governor General's Award for English language poetry or drama was divided.
The Governor General's Award for English-language drama honours excellence in Canadian English-language playwriting. The award was created in 1981 when the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry or drama was divided.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer.
George Washington Carmack was an American prospector in the Yukon. He was originally credited with registering Discovery Claim, the discovery of gold that set off the Klondike Gold Rush on August 16, 1896. Today, historians usually give the credit to his Tagish brother-in-law, Skookum Jim Mason.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
The Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award is a Canadian literary award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an established Canadian author to honour their body of work.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2011.
Kim Thúy Ly Thanh, CM CQ is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer. Kim Thúy was born in Vietnam in 1968. At the age of 10 she left Vietnam along with a wave of refugees commonly referred to in the media as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, and restaurant owner. The author has received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 31 languages and distributed across 43 countries and territories. Kim Thúy lives in Montreal where she devotes her time to writing.
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. Born on Vancouver Island, deWitt lives in Portland, Oregon, and has acquired American citizenship. As of 2023, he has written five novels: Ablutions (2009), The Sisters Brothers (2011), Undermajordomo Minor (2015), French Exit (2018) and The Librarianist (2023).
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018).
The second season of the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire premiered on September 25, 2011, and concluded on December 11, 2011, consisting of 12 episodes. The series was created by Terence Winter and based on the book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson. Set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era, the series stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a political figure who rose to prominence and controlled Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition period of the 1920s and 1930s. The second season takes place between February and August 1921. The second season was released on DVD and Blu-ray in region 1 on August 28, 2012.
The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton. Set in New Zealand's South Island in 1866, the novel follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the West Coast settlement of Hokitika to make his fortune on the goldfields. Instead, he stumbles into a tense meeting between twelve local men, and is drawn into a complex mystery involving a series of unsolved crimes. The novel's complex structure is based on the system of Western astrology, with each of the twelve local men representing one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and with another set of characters representing planets in the solar system.
The Sisters Brothers is a 2018 Western film directed by Jacques Audiard from a screenplay he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel of the same name by Patrick deWitt. An American and French co-production, it is Audiard's first English-language work. The film stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as the notorious assassin brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, and follows the two brothers as they chase after two men who have banded together to search for gold.
Joshua Whitehead is a Canadian First Nations, two spirit poet and novelist.
Emma Hooper is a Canadian writer. She is most notable for her 2018 novel Our Homesick Songs, which was named as a longlisted nominee for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Born and raised in Alberta, she moved to England in 2004 after completing her B.A. in music and writing at the University of Alberta. She completed an M.A. in creative writing at Bath Spa University before undertaking a Ph.D. in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia, which she completed in 2010. She subsequently taught at Bath Spa University. Her debut novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, was published in 2015, and was a shortlisted finalist for the amazon.ca First Novel Award. Our Homesick Songs followed in 2018.
Split Tooth is a 2018 novel by Canadian musician Tanya Tagaq. Based in part on her own personal journals, the book tells the story of a young Inuk woman growing up in the Canadian Arctic in the 1970s.
Undermajordomo Minor is a 2015 novel by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt. It is his third novel and was published by House of Anansi Press on September 5, 2015. The novel is a gothic fable set in an unspecified time and location that has been compared to 19th-century Central and Eastern Europe.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
