Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is an odd, quirky and compelling novel. Set in the American west in 1851, the brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired guns working for a shadowy figure known as Commodore. They are given instructions to kill a gold prospector called Herman Kermit Warm, and the novel tells the story of their journey in search of this Warm character, and the people, adventures and mishaps they run into along the way, until, about halfway into the novel, they finally catch up with their man.

The novel is narrated by the younger brother, Eli, and the prose style is taut, lucid and minimalist; deWitt offers only the barest minimum of descriptive detail about the novel’s characters and locations. Whether you like this style or not is matter of taste, but for me it worked really well, and the novel transported me to a particular time and place with vivid cinematic detail.  Rarely do I feel as firmly planted in a novel’s world as I did when I was reading The Sisters Brothers, and deWitt achieves this by using just a few deft descriptive strokes and allowing the reader’s imagination to take over and fill in the rest.

It’s a darkly comic novel, but it’s also much more than that. The characters the Brothers meet on their journey are an eccentric and oddball bunch, and each vignette is satisfying in its own right. There are moments of tenderness, vulnerability and friendship –  and then occasional explosions of violence. There are also scenes of terrific tension, where the stakes are life-or-death and you genuinely don’t know how the situation will play out. It’s a novel of surprises, of the unexpected, of the labyrinthine ways we can navigate our way through life. And it is also occasionally a novel of breathtaking beauty.

Eli is always an engaging – and surprisingly sympathetic – narrator.  His moral compass my be skewed when judged by modern standards, but, despite his profession as a killer, he is a character of depth and has his own code of honour. Eli is the reluctant killer; Charlie is the one who relishes their profession and is the driving force behind what they do. This ever-changing fraternal relationship is the backbone of the novel, the canvas on which everything else is painted. The brothers bicker, disagree, harbour resentments, occasionally ignore each other and go their separate ways, but ultimately the fraternal glue that binds them together allows them to ride out their disagreements and ultimately reach a point of understanding with each other.

The Sisters Brother is a portrait of a pre-civilised world in which death, disease and destitution are constant threats. A lawless world in which a stranger is as likely to shoot you as shake your hand. I found reading this book an intensely enjoyable experience, and when I reached the end of its lean 320 pages – although what I’d read felt satisfying and complete – I’d have been happy had there been 300 more pages to read.  I think it’s a great book, and one that will linger long in my memory.