finalist for the 2021 Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition

Masterful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Cyclone Release speaks to the unpredictability of love and loss and the seemingly heartless way life changes on a dime, while offering readers an intimate view into the bizarre landscape of the Silicon Valley tech start-up. An impressive debut.—Danielle Girard, USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestselling Author of Far Gone

In a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley, Brendon Meagher is a modern-day Tommy Wilhelm for fans of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Overby delivers a poignant look over the cubicle walls of a high-tech start-up and into the lives of hard-charging acolytes. Filled with love and loss, and propelled by the looming promise of financial windfall, this debut is not to be missed!—Jeffery Hess, author of No Salvation and the Beachhead trilogy

In The Cyclone Release, Bruce Overby registers the shifting landscape of San Francisco’s South Bay, where orange groves and pastoral farm life have given way to big tech campuses, the mad energy of startups, and IPOs. We follow Brendon, an experienced tech writer, as he grapples with a new job—and the intensity of an impending IPO—in the wake of his wife’s sudden death. When he is finally ready to explore love again, he discovers an unlikely connection between his new workplace interest and his dead wife. Overby brings the book to satisfying crescendo with secrets revealed, an IPO launched, and a believable, sympathetic main character who finds himself facing a new, unexpected horizon of possibility.— Angela Pneuman, author of Home Remedies and Lay It On My Heart