Will Chaffee has done everything right. At thirty-four he's built Sawbuck - a fintech platform serving the people the system was never designed to help - and just closed a billion-dollar Series A. He has the right apartment, the right woman on his arm, the right story to tell at the right dinners. His father's voice is underneath all of it, the way it always is. Then a Peruvian prison cell strips everything away. No deal to close. No performance to give. Just a man named Mateo Quispe, a worn piece of paper, and a word Will doesn't have in English. La mecha. The wick. The part of the candle that was made, from the beginning, to carry the flame. Momentum Is a Lie follows Will Chaffee from a Greenwich New Year's Eve party in December 2008 - where he first understands that his father is performing too - through the launch, rise, and collapse of Sawbuck, and into the Peruvian prison cell that asks him to account for everything he built and everything he abandoned along the way. A novel about what a man does when he has built everything he was told to want and discovered it was someone else's answer to someone else's question. About inherited identity, the gap between arrival and meaning, and what remains when the momentum finally stops. Momentum Is a Lie is Harry Holland's debut novel.