Books by Alexander Sammartino
“We start off with what feels like quite an unpromising situation: a man, David Rizzio, in midlife, flailing in debt. He owns a gun shop that is going under. He’s got himself in trouble through various financial Ponzi schemes. His son is a recovering heroin addict who, at the beginning of the book, almost dies of an overdose. David feels there is almost a miraculous aspect to his son’s survival, although they are both pretty unhappy characters at the beginning. So David decides he is going to make the greatest commercial for his gun shop. The comedy is there in a very understated humour, sharp observation about certain aspects of American life and the characters that surround them. It’s more of a slow burn, this one. The characters get their hooks into you.” Read more...
Stephanie Merritt, Journalist
Interviews where books by Alexander Sammartino were recommended
The Funniest Books of 2025, recommended by Stephanie Merritt
Every year, the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction draw up a shortlist of books that made them laugh out loud. We asked the novelist Stephanie Merritt, one of the 2025 judges, to talk us through the eight books in the running for the title of the funniest book of the year.
