Description
The Cyclone Release:
A Novel of Silicon Valley by Bruce Overby
Runner-up – Madville’s 2021 Blue Moon Novel Competition
ISBN: 978-1-956440-08-9 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-09-6 ebook $9.99
November 15, 2022
It’s the late 90s Internet boom, and Brendon Meagher has just lost his wife Sadie in a freakish car accident at the edge of Silicon Valley. The Cyclone Release follows Brendon as he emerges from tragedy and lands in a pre-IPO start-up that promises astonishing riches. Mo Gramercy, a bright and commanding colleague with her own deep secret, joins Brendon, disrupts his malaise, and takes him as her lover. The characters’ careen toward IPO millions, their secrets suddenly converging, and both are shaken without mercy from bucolic notions of work, life, and impending fortune.
What readers are saying about The Cyclone Release:
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
Born in California’s Santa Clara Valley long before it became the Silicon Valley of today, BRUCE OVERBY both participated in and keenly observed the transformation and evolution of an insular place that many still fail to understand. His fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and his story “Bookmarks” won First Prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. He holds an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and continues to live in Northern California with his wife Caroline. The Cyclone Release, a finalist in the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition, is his first novel.
kpdavis –
The competition was fierce for Madville’s first an only Blue Moon Novel Competition 2021, and this book rose to the top of a mighty heap of contenders. It is a beautifully written, fast-paced tragedy. Everybody sees the trainwreck coming except the two protagonists. It left me with a delicious melancholy. I wept for those characters–all of them caught in a strange, artificial existence–working past the point of exhaustion for months to attain enormous wealth when a startup goes public. I can’t say any more or it will spoil the story.