This year's Man Booker Prize longlist has thrown up some eccentric choices; but The Sisters Brothers, an eccentric novel in both structure and tone, thoroughly deserves its nomination.

Charlie and Eli Sisters are strongmen in the pay of the unnamed Commodore, sent from Oregon to San Francisco to relieve an entrepreneur named Hermann Kermit Warm of a formula he has discovered for prospecting gold, and his life (in that order). Charlie, the elder sibling, is the