One Last Snide Comment

One Last Snide Comment

Sam Snider was once on the edge of literary success. Now he is drinking through the days in a small London flat, writing books he refuses to publish and trying to keep his sister from destroying herself.

Over one chaotic week, Sam’s fragile routine begins to fall apart. An old flame offers him a way back into the publishing world. A wealthy client’s wife pulls him into a reckless encounter. His sister’s unpredictable best friend secretly makes a life-changing decision on his behalf. And at the centre of it all is Rosy, the sex worker who has become the one person who might truly understand him.

Raw, darkly funny, and emotionally brutal, One Last Snide Comment is a literary novel about grief, addiction, self-sabotage, fractured family bonds, and the terrifying possibility of a second chance.

Read One Last Snide Comment and step into Sam Snider’s bitter, chaotic, and unforgettable world.

Excerpt from the book

A half-empty glass of rum sat to my right, begging to be drained as a swirl of smoke drifted upward. The only light in my dingy piece-of-crap shack came from the computer screen, illuminating my average-looking mug.

Death is a funny old thing. Sure, she affects us all in different ways, but a few constants remain: loss and change. Whoever says death changes nothing has clearly never lost anyone. Death can upend your entire world; the trick is not to let it.

I never learned that trick.

I used to be someone. Well, someone who was about to become someone.

I never really thought much of myself as a writer. I did it because I enjoyed it. Then the first book got published and sold fairly well, and I really enjoyed it.

So much so, I wrote a second. Then a third.

But then everything went wrong. Just as my dream of becoming an international bestselling author was within reach, it all slipped away.

Sure, I could have grabbed it with both hands, but the truth is, I threw it away.

I was a twenty-one-year-old on the verge of having it all, and despite my growing success, I still lived at home with my sister and our parents.

Our older brother used to live with us too, but he moved out, met a girl, things got serious, and then they moved away. Far away.

Because we hadn’t seen him in months, our parents decided to pay him a visit. They could have driven to his place in France—rather, they should have driven—but they wanted to fly out and surprise him instead.

The plane never arrived. Its demise was broadcast on every news channel.

That whole day I felt something was wrong, but I never acted on it. I just said goodbye and let them go. Now they were being reported as dead. No survivors.

That was the day my parents died. The day I had to sit my eighteen-year-old sister down and tell her what happened. The day I had to make the worst phone call of my life—to my brother. And the day everything changed.

I bade farewell to success and let myself become just another author whose name faded into obscurity. I sank to the bottom of as many bottles as I could lay my hands on.

That was almost three years ago, and I look back on that moment every single day.

But what’s the point in what-ifs and wishing to change the past? The past is set, and there’s bugger all anyone can do about it.

Mind you, that’s probably a bit too much information for the first chapter. But some people have their way of doing things, and I have mine. And I’m the one telling this story.

So here I sit in shadowy squalor: a heavy-drinking, failed writer living in London who spends half his time looking after his sister and the other half worrying about her.