Hundreds of pages of anecdotal beauty, comedy mined from the spaces between personalities (loved the kid who kept getting hit on the head), and a touching view of the understandings that are still being found in a world that exists on the precipice of a suffocating and diseased modernity. Revisionism is so much the MO of westerns now that trying to write 'The Last Western' is its own kind of torturous cliche, so how refreshing it is that The Sisters Brothers stays so intimate. The curdling third act can say so many things about the effects of commerce and innovation on the natural world (and the crucial way in which the identities of people are ground down in this corruption), but by the time you reach the epilogue, and Eli is fighting back tears talking to his mum, it feels so much bigger for its smallness. One day, you will have to put down your toy guns and cowboy hats, and that will not mean those times were worthless; they may very well be the best you have ever had, but it will mean that you have to leave something behind in the transition. We have lost touch, and maybe it's because the world has grown colder and crueller, or maybe it is just because we have grown. And so the book, always funny, always propulsive, seeds droplets of melancholy throughout that only spring to life as you reach its final pages, and realise that the deep affection that holds these brothers in lockstep, while not false or temporary, is retrospective, and that the ways they love each other in the forever after this story will only be imitations of the closeness they held within it. The Eli narrating the book, taking the form of bitterness and fondness in equal portions, is mourning that loss far before we learn it has happened. This is as fun a novel as I have ever seen successfully suck all of the air out of the room. To so thoughtfully betray the free-wheeling glee that the reader has had ample time to fall in love with: I was thrilled to see it.