Is the Year's Best Novel a Western?

The best novel I read this year is the best novel I have read in years: “The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick deWitt. It is so perfectly in accord with my tastes and sensibilities that it immediately took a place on my list of favorite novels — a set of 25 oddly assorted and constantly reshuffled works (among them novels by E. F. Benson, Sigrid Undset, Charles Portis, Dawn Powell, Flann O’Brien and Evelyn Waugh). But I’m hardly alone – the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in Britain, and last month it won Canada’s Governor General’s Award, higher than which no book can climb in those northern parts.