The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers is a western novel by the Canadian-born writer Patrick deWitt, published in 2011 and set in Oregon and California in 1851. It was adapted for the cinema in 2018.

Eli and Charlie Sisters are assassins of minor repute working for a wealthy businessman known only as the Commodore, and their assignment is to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, a prospector accused of stealing from their employer. Charlie is hard-nosed, plainspoken and more impulsive than his younger brother, while Eli narrates the book and does not share Charlie's appetite for whiskey or for killing, though he has never known any other work. The journey from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento takes them through a West full of cheats, losers and opportunists, and along the way Eli begins to question what he does for a living and whom he does it for.

DeWitt writes a comic and violent road novel that pays homage to the classic western while treating its hired guns as employees with grievances about pay and conditions.