Endearing Assassins

The awards season has been kind to Patrick deWitt this year. His second novel, The Sisters Brothers, recently won the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Giller. On a promo on the CBC, staff at House of Anansi complained, with tongues firmly implanted in cheeks, that the book’s front cover would suffer for all the extra awards emblems they were forced to display. DeWitt’s novel has clearly enchanted Canada’s literary scene, and rightfully so. It is a provocative story—an innovative and playful western—that strikes a fine balance between the richly suggestive and the blazingly hard realities of a mean and dirty world.

The Sisters Brothers is the story of Eli and Charlie Sisters, two brothers who work as hired guns for the Commodore, a man whose shadowy presence colours the novel with the persistent threat of violence. The year is 1851, and...