The Bitter Half

For Sumit, life was on the right track with a successful and promising career ahead, so, little did he expect it to hit him so hard, that it would disrupt normalcy and force him to take a path least traversed. With shattered dreams and no hopes of resuscitation, he collects back those pieces and starts rebuilding everything from scratch in order to recoup his honour and dignity. Alternating between timelines of the past and present, set against the backdrop of Haldia, Rourkela and Mumbai; Simon's debut novel The Bitter Half : a dichotomy of Trust & Betrayal' is inspired by a set of true events that provides a poignant view into the dark world of a litigant’s melancholic sufferings.

The Bitter Half opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where Chris Pollard, a famed if eccentric authority on jail breaks, has been called in to investigate the case of The Kid, an inmate who has broken out of every prison in which he has been held. The Kid appears and disappears, eluding his pursuers, while at Pollard's Wisconsin estate a rag-tag group of travelers and refugees come together, including a black family from Florida, a female candy store owner known as Bo Peep, and a troupe of down-and-out entertainers. As Pollard and The Kid traverse the wasteland of Depression-era America, an obsessive, evasive, and erotic attraction grows between the two, culminating in a final confrontation at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In revealing their tangled attraction and intertwined fates, The Bitter Half offers a striptease of masks and mysteries, slowly revealing a web of seductions, assumptions, and miscues of desire. Praise for Toby Olson's fiction:

The churning politics of Trieste in 1906 provide the perfect backdrop for murder in the first in a series set in British embassies and consulates in the early 1900s featuring Special Branch officer Seymour. When the British consul goes missing, who's responsible: the secret police, revolutionaries, or a mysterious lover?

There is no one quite like her. Michelle Obama. This is the first book to tell the astonishing story of a woman whose intellect, verbal flair, and poise are certain to make her one of the most influential First Ladies in history. A woman whose remark, “For the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country,” did her husband's campaign no good. A woman whose impassioned speech to the Democratic National Convention may have helped win him the Oval Office. A woman touted as a future presidential candidate herself. Readers are given a revealing and intimate look at Michelle Obama's remarkable life—from her Chicago childhood to her education at Princeton and Harvard, from how she first met Barack Obama at the prestigious law firm where they were the only African-Americans, to her role as his closest adviser, and to her own political beliefs. For Michelle, family comes first, and—like so many women who struggle between family and career—she seriously weighed her husband's presidential ambitions before giving her stamp of approval. Apparently she struck a hard bargain: he had to give up smoking.