-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Colum McCann
Book Reviewed by:A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin.
"Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell's journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?
Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.
Chapter 1
We are all shards in the smash-up.
Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.
I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days—we have all had our difficulties with the shape of the truth, and I am not going to claim myself as any exception. But others have tried to tell Conway's story and, so far as I know, they got it largely wrong. For the most part, he moved quietly and without much fuss, but his was a lantern heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared.
I am quite sure that I will hear the name of Conway again and again in the years to come: what happened to him, what strange forces worked upon him, how he was wrecked in the pursuit of love, how he fooled himself into believing that he was something he was not, how we fooled ourselves in return, and how he ...
What are you reading this week? (3/27/2025)
I'm reading Twist by Colum McCann. It's easily accessible but sort of an odd subject: repairing deep water cables.
-Anne_Glasgow
With his always elegant prose, Colum McCann is one of those rare writers who successfully arcs back and forth between the wide-angle perspective of global and societal concerns and its opposite, the sharply focused close-up on individuals and their specific and complicated human lives. His novels expand and contract in an almost breath-like manner. Like his free-diving characters, McCann is willing to risk plunging into the depths in the hope of better articulating what exists in the dimmer reaches of the human heart: "Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter." Throughout the novel, McCann emphasizes that life is built on cycles of rupture and repair. At sea, without the usual distractions and escapes, it becomes harder to avoid facing one's demons. Fennell's path to wholeness is crooked and incomplete, but he is ultimately able to take tentative steps toward change and reconnection. Others may not be as fortunate. Some breakages cannot be mended and some actions cannot be understood. As Conway notes, inevitably, "Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."..continued
Full Review
(672 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
Much of Colum McCann's novel Twist takes place on a cable repair ship sent to locate and fix a breakage in the underwater cables conveying the globe's digital information pathways.
For many of us, perhaps because of the metaphorical terms used for internet storage and connection, such as cyberspace and the cloud, when we imagine the path of the world's information superhighway we look to the sky, perhaps envisioning some kind of literal cloud of information crackling above us, or at least high-powered satellite connections. However, on a bit-for-bit basis, even the most advanced satellite technology cannot begin to compete with the good old-fashioned Submarine Cable System, which is made up of hundreds of cables placed across...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Twist, try these:
by Richard Powers
Published 2024
A magisterial new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment.
by Rachel Kushner
Published 2024
From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and "one of the most gifted authors of her generation" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark ...
Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.
Ginseng Roots
by Craig Thompson
A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.
The Original Daughter
by Jemimah Wei
A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Serial Killer Games
by Kate Posey
A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!