One of those novels I’ve had for ages, and yet not managed to read yet… I know many people who loved Patrick deWitt‘s multi-award-winning The Sisters Brothers (especially friends in Canada), so I hope to get to it very soon — ideally, before the movie adaptation comes out.

The Sisters Brothers was directed by Jacques Audiard, who also wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed. It was produced by Annapurna Pictures.

Here’s the novel’s synopsis:

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlies Sisters, ride — fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn’t an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a living — and whom he does it for.

The Sisters Brothers pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable ribald tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of losers, cheaters, and ne’er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

The Sisters Brothers is published by House of Anansi Press in Canada, Ecco in the US and Granta Books in the UK.

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