Gallo

From the award-winning author of Last Acts comes an elegant, hilarious redemption story in which our everyman hero, the aging professional bodybuilder Tom Gallo (the eleventh best bodybuilder in the world, he would clarify), plunges down a destructive path for a last shot at perfection.

"While many novelists are struggling to figure out how best to address the state of the nation—centerless, ridiculous, and terrifying, doomed yet trivial, dire yet unheroic—Sammartino seems to have cracked the code." —The New York Times Book Review

Veteran professional bodybuilder Tom Gallo still believes he can win it all. But his family disagrees. Yes: his wife, Lisa, and his sister, Debbie, have seen enough of his "art," and everyone is eager for the oft-injured, forty-something hustler to retire from the stage for good. But when a younger pro dies, Gallo gets the call to take his spot in the contest that will finally change his life—just not in the way he was hoping.

Gallo is an ode to the great literary portraits, in the tradition of Stoner by John Williams and The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy. Set in the suburban desert of Phoenix, Arizona, this distinctly American novel—both heartbreaking and absurd—is about ambition, addiction, faith, family, and mortality, and it marks the latest achievement by an extraordinary new talent.