“We don’t really know the dark until we get there.”

As soon as I learned McCann had a new book coming out I knew I wanted to read it regardless of the topic he was choosing to write about. I trust this author that much.

Twist follows Anthony Fennell who is hired to write a longform journalism piece on the repair of data cables that lie on the ocean floor. He travels to Cape Town and meets up with the chief of mission, John A Conway. Fennell will join Conway aboard the repair vessel as it goes out to sea. Conway makes it clear that under no circumstances will he be able to be rescued or return before the job is done. Before leaving, Fennell joins Conway at his home for a visit and meets Zanele, his partner, and the children. Zanele and Conway are both free divers able to dive deep and hold their breath for several minutes. Zanele is also an actor who is leaving to go to perform in England as the book opens. What Fennell learns aboard the vessel will go into his piece. The story is written from hindsight with Fennell trying to organize his thoughts and all that has happened since his excursion into a story that will draw the reader’s attention.

I didn’t know that more data is stored beneath the ocean in these fibre optic cables than what is stored in the cloud. There were many interesting tidbits which showed the serious research McCann conducts before writing his books. But really the story is so much more than that. There is commentary on colonialism, love, regret, and human connection.

Were I someone that could read 256 pages in one sitting, I would have as I did not want to put it down.

Thank you to @netgalley and @randomhouse for an eARC of Colum McCann’s newest title, Twist, in exchange for my honest opinions. Please note this book publishes March 25, 2025 and the quote used in this review may not reflect the finished copy.

This was absolutely everything that I hoped it would be after hearing from so many people about how great call him. Ken is in fact, this was actually even better than I imagined it would be. This was a strong five stars. It is one of those bags that you open up and start reading and no within a few pages that you are reading something that is truly special. You know how there are times. When you come across a passage in a book that speaks to you in such a way that makes you feel like finally someone has put into words a feeling that you didn’t even know you had? That to me, as the essence of true literary talent, and Colin McMahon has that talent, the sort of talent that grabs you by the heart and squeezes.

When you come across a passage in a book that speaks to you in such a way that makes you feel like finally someone has put into words a feeling that you didn’t even know you had? That to me, as the essence of true literary talent, and Colin McMahon has that talent, the sort of talent that grabs you by the heart and squeezes.

There is so much about this book to love from the subject matter to the pacing and style to the technical writing to the perfect ending. Endings can so often ruin a great book, and so many authors fall into the trappings of poor endings, where they know what they wanted their character to experience, but not necessarily what they wanted them to learn in the end, and that is not the case. In this book at all, he could not have landed the plane Any more smoothly. I love the issues that are spoken about, and tackled so beautifully without being the central focus of the entire book, issues, like toxic masculinity, and the way Ken, she lives in was very prevalent, and the significant by remain secondary to the characters, continued growth. I also at the one box about revolutions as they bring about such a feeling of aliveness, and in life in the world so much bigger than oneself, and that is so much the essence of what I found within these pages, that there is so much that we are simultaneously involved in an a part of, and also barely consequential. These issues that are asking mean everything in our lives, but Ken also said to remind us that we are nothing in the grand scheme of things, and that so much of what we get hung up on, is meaningless in the face of annihilation.

There is also a love triangle in this book, which is not something that I tend to enjoy and often feel that it is a trope put in just for the sake of adding conflict even though there is no true conflict, because one is set up to be so much better than the other in our eyes, and so that their characters as well and, I can very much enjoy a book about unrequited love just as I can very much enjoy a book about two people that love the same person, but when the set up is written in a way that is more so about unrequited love, but shapes it as a love triangle that bothers me because it feels like a cheap trick, but that did not happen here that love triangle was written as perfectly as a love triangle can be written, where one understands every single person within the triangle and fields for each of them, and truly understands why each of them are in their place.

Yes, this was absolutely stunning and my Facebook by the time Darin and I will inevitably be making my way through his entire backlog, and also like this is a gem, a once in a generation type of Friday, and I find myself to be very lucky to be from this time so that I can read his beautiful words. This deserves all the stars.

Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for the free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Irish journalist Anthony Fennell is a journalist struggling with alcoholism and a lack of direction. When his editor assigns him a story about ships that repair underwater cable breaks, he is less than enthusiastic. But the allure of being at sea and evading the pressures of his life ultimately compels him to accept the assignment. Due to a massive underwater avalanches of plants, trees, and garbage, triggered by the Congo River's response to environmental abuse, the cables connecting Africa to the rest of the world are severed and cause a major communication crisis.

This is such a compelling and relevant story about our dependence upon the internet, fiber optic networks and communication in the digital age. This is a very well written and fast paced story with likable characters and current themes. The writing and story pulls you in and does not let you go until the end. Highly recommend!

Shhh…

Irish journalist Anthony Fennell is disconnected, grappling with alcoholism and a lack of direction. When his editor assigns him a story about ships that repair underwater cable breaks, he hesitates. However, the allure of sailing out to sea and evading the pressures of his life ashore ultimately compels him to accept the assignment.

“What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.” *

Undersea fiber-optic cables are vital for global communication. In "Twist," massive underwater avalanches of plants, trees, and garbage, triggered by the Congo River's response to environmental abuse, sever the cables connecting Africa to the rest of the world, and cause a major communication crisis.

The novel follows a very “Gatsby-esque” path, as Fennell's focus shifts from documenting the repair mission to his growing fascination with Conway, the mission's leader, and Zanele, Conway's lover. Initially presented as a reliable figure, Conway's behavior takes an unexpected and erratic twist, throwing Fennell off balance. Despite the intention to avoid a personality-driven narrative, Fennell’s obsession with Conway overshadows the repair mission and ultimately takes center stage.

The breakdown of communication, both societally and personally, is central to the story. There is a mysterious disruption of mass communication, while a man in midlife crisis struggles to reconnect with his ex-wife and estranged son. The overabundance of information in the world hasn't prevented the deterioration of human relationships.

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.” *

“You can ache for years and not even know that you’ve been aching. The ache has gone so deep that it seems to come from another life, one now even remembered anymore.” *

The captivating story of the Conway saga and the charismatic, mysterious captain was more developed than the narrator’s inner conflict. McCann's prose is brilliant, but the merging of the two storylines felt forced. The passages on our reliance on undersea cables were also fascinating.

Thank you to the Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #Twist #NetGalley

*Quotes are taken from an uncorrected proof. Publishing March 25, 2025

A character driven fascinating novel by one of my favorite authors! The background narrative about the maintenance of the underwater cables was educational and it was a bit frightening to learn how tenuous these connections. The drama tied in well with the characters' flaws.

The mood, atmosphere and setting of this story are what makes this story shine. The scenes underwater are breathtaking, and the feel of the small African town is so well written. The writing is poetic, and the subject matter is interesting. All these cables at the bottom of the oceans carrying the world’s information and connecting humans to each other. The life of the men on the repair boat is just grueling, months out at sea with limited contact with loved ones back home. The irony of these men having little to no contact with the world while they are tasked to repair the connectivity of humanity is SO fascinating. This story relies on character development of the three main characters, Fennell, Conway and Zanele, and their interconnectedness. Overall, this is an engaging story that is beautifully written with a new to me subject.

McCann's sentence level writing is so incredibly good. I am in awe of the writing in this book. It also had a mystery that worked. I wouldn't necessarily call it page turning, but rather a deep character study. This sent me into a deep dive about the ocean floor and I'm grateful for it.

Gorgeous writing, powerful story, mysterious and alluring, with an ending that blew me away. For whatever reason I didn’t expect this to be a book I loved so much. Highly recommend.

An introspective thriller that explores not only the depths of sea cables carrying all our data between continents but also the depths of our unresolved life emotions.

Anthony Fennell, a discontented Irish writer who has hit both a writer’s block and a sense of life stagnation, nabs a magazine assignment to go to South Africa and cover a crew that specializes in repairing deep sea data cable breaks. He meets fellow Irishman John Conway, an engineer and diver who serves as Chief of Mission for a boat that coverages the Atlantic Ocean. John mostly wraps himself in an air of remove, but while waiting around weeks for the next cable emergency, Anthony does get a chance to meet Zanele, John’s partner who’s a striking, aspiring Black South African actress, and their twin sons.

Fascinated by John, John tries to uncover all he can about John’s seemingly incongruous background with only a modicum of success. Part of his quest also parallels Anthony’s own deeper dive into how he ended up in such a state a low self-regard and quiet despair.
When finally a cable ruptures due to a river landslide into a deep ocean abyss, Anthony sets sail with John and the crew. The cable repair proves one of their toughest ones yet- having to make guesswork of snaring the cable with a large, lowered hook. John also opens up a bit more to Anthony after a brutal attack on Zanele who’s left to England to stage a controversial staging of a Shakespearian play.

McCann leaves many deep questions lingering about the state of the world that’s so dependent on information zipping along the ocean’s depths in a very thin glass cable. With powerful and lyrical prose, and no ready answers, McCann also challenges us to reexamine the often-fragile emotional undercurrents of our own lives, that can get unexpectedly severed and in need of rescue.

Thanks to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Twist was my first book by the author and I've never read anything like it. Overall I found it to be gripping, informational and thought provoking. It did include more interpersonal commentary and family dynamics which I enjoyed and thought was done well. The ending has a massive twist I didn't expect which seems fitting. My only, very mild, complaint, is I wish it had been more about the underwater lines or been more explicit in the synopsis about what it was about. That's a very mild complaint, I overall loved this story, it will stick with me for a long time. Because the ending is so explosive, I think this would make a great bookclub read.

I really enjoyed this tense, atmospheric book - I never thought this would be the sort of read I enjoy but I was hooked. I loved the remote setting of the boat off the shore of western Africa and the narrative style, with plenty of hints of the doom to come. Plenty of intrigue throughout and I really enjoyed how it all wrapped up.

4 Stars for the topic and research but not for my personal taste. This is the type of novel that shouldn't be penalized for my personal lack of interest in the writing style or content for the author is very talented and weaves an almost poetic story, but I had to trudge through this. Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough or maybe it was just a lack of interest in the approach to a topic that I thought would interest me. I had zero connection to any of the characters and it took me weeks to finish this novel.

The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann has yet again stitched together an intriguing story based on known truths in his latest novel, Twist, which came out this month. As in his novel, Apeirogon, McCann continues to impress us as a great storyteller, with excellent character development and his ability to bring to light the sum of our existence as humans. An Irish journalist and playwright, Anthony Fennel, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. I certainly had no idea that our massive highway of information was not being transmitted via satellites and, instead, was happening deep beneath the sea! Fennel connects with Conway, a skilled engineer and freediver, on a cable repair ship, and the thematic journey of love, mystery, belonging, absence, and the upsides and downsides of severed connections begins. I am a huge fan of McCann’s investigative writing style and highly recommend this book!

I aim to be a completist in Colum McCann's works, though now I have only read 3: Apierogon (a favorite book), Let the Great World Spin, and now Twist. I can trust McCann's prose to make me pause and admire his turn of phrase, and his themes are always multilayered. Twist is about the fiber cables under the sea that power the internet and the crews who have to go and repair those cables if they break - but this is just the way he tells us a story about brokenness, loneliness, belonging, and the global impact of the choices we make. This was a haunting story focused on two men - the chief of mission on one of these ships and the journalist who tags along for a writing project. I did not know a lot about this subject and learned so much, but I also can't stop thinking about these characters and the larger ideas of technology and connection. This reading experience was like a kaleidoscope, where once I thought I had a handle on the picture, the author would turn it ever so slightly. So, so clever. I am glad I have already preordered a copy for my bookshelves. 4.5 stars.

DNF. Some sort of odd Hemingway lite. Men drinking too much. Regret. Free diving. Men not drinking at all while at sea. Regret. Disaffection from those they love. All women either embittered or objectified or both. Regret. What a self-indulgent yawn fest. No one cares about your regrets, guys. Trying being better people and you wouldn't have so many. Try that, maybe.

Colum McCann is a storyteller. In this work he spins the story of two Irishmen,: Anthony Fennell, a journalist, dissatisfied with life, and John Conway, a diver who heads a cable repair mission off the African coast. Fennell seeks the truth; Conway handily dismisses it. Both characters reflect one another. During the voyage questions arise about the motives of both and, when one goes missing, the reader joins in the quest for answers. It is not so important what the characters learn about one another as what the reader learns about the world of communication. McCann provides much in the descriptions of the cables, their history and the beautiful, mysterious deep sea world that surrounds them. These passages are vivid and unforgettable.

Twist (2025 Releases Today)
By Colum McCann
Random House, 256 pages
★★★★

“Everything gets fixed. And we remain broken.”

Colum McCann is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. If I were to ask you if you had any interest in reading about underwater fiber optic cables, I suspect that you would think I was joking. Nope! McCann’s latest novel Twist is indeed about cables and it takes some mighty good writing to stoke interest in such things. But, like the communication cables hugging the ocean floor, Twist is also about hidden things lurking within the human psyche.

Twist centers on two men who, in very different ways, are broken. Our narrator is Irish journalist Anthony Fennell. He has been a respected writer, but has grown bored and stale. Few know what a mess his personal life is. His ex-wife and son live in South America and he hides his pain in insularity and perhaps too much booze. As much out of escapism as burning interest, Fennell takes an assignment to write about crews that repair cables by dragging the ocean floor with a grappling hook to find broken cables, repair them, and lower them back to the ocean floor.

Where better for a broken man to go than the ends of the earth? Fennell’s journey begins in South Africa where he boards a ship captained by another Irishman, John Conway. But if you think Fennell and Conway will bond, you’re wrong. Conway is suspicious, taciturn, avoids the limelight, and projects a get-it-done attitude toward a job he seems neither to like nor hate. About all Fennell learns for quite some time is that Conway is dating Zanelle, a South African actress who is fast becoming a famous celebrity. Fennell has connection issues of his own, but he can’t help but wonder why Conway has chosen to leave “Zee” and sail away for an indeterminate time along Africa’s west coast. Why indeterminate? The ship can’t leave one spot until it actually finds all of the broken cables. It is a task akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Currents are strong in many parts of the ocean floor, cables get snagged on bottom formations, and all the crew knows are the approximate coordinates of where the cable was originally laid. Undershoot and you miss it; overshoot and you miss it. Either way, you must turn about and try again until you snag something not much larger in diameter than a heavy-duty garden hose.

Readers of McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will recall that tightrope daredevil Philipe Petit is used as a metaphor. If you think of fiber optics as a bundle of thread-like wires, you can infer that McCann has a thing about life on the thin edge. Petit hovered over 1360 feet into the air surrounded by empty space; Conway searched for a cable in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes he even free dives to fix a cable, a skill requiring extraordinary breath control. Precarious odds doesn’t even begin to get it. Conway has an exacting job to do and Fennell has a lot of time to think. He is like the elusive cable in that much of the time WiFi is unavailable, unreliable, or access is tightly controlled. But Fennell does get enough online time to make inquiries about Captain Conway and learn that he's not who he says he is.

The ship makes its way slowly up the coast fixing cables that could literally leave much of Africa, the world’s least-wired continent, cut off from the world. The mission continues, though Fennell leaves the boat to pursue a bigger mystery that consumes him as he dives deeper and drifts further away from discovery.

The title Twist takes on various meanings, cable kinks, disconnections, unexpected revelations, twisted minds…. The novel has been compared to various other dark mysteries but to my mind, McCann has given us a new take on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Fiber optics as high-falutin’ literary fiction? Bet on it. Cables can be fixed once you find them, but can lost men be repaired?

Rob Weir

#Twist #NetGalley

Fascinating subject, great author. I know quite a bit about the world of undersea cables and I was impressed and captivated by Twist. Colum McCann gets it right--again. This book is an absolute pleasure from start to finish.

First, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book. I have not read any other books by Colum McCann, but I am adding them to my MUST- read TBRs.

It's hard for me to describe this book, so I won't try to categorize it. You can find summaries elsewhere. I was absolutely enchanted by McCann's prose. I highlighted so many sections to go back and re-read, I might as well start at the beginning of the book. Which I very well may do. His writing is just gorgeous, his characterizations full of life and energy. Those people live through his words and imagination. It's hard for me to believe they are fictional characters! Finishing this book was like saying goodbye to family and friends and I will mourn their loss.

I will be recommending this to my book club and everyone I know who appreciates and enjoys a great story, well developed characters, and a fascinating look into a field I didn't even know existed.

This story, certainly, highlights the fragility of the global communications system and how easily it could be disrupted. The dependence on deep water fiber optic cabling, which is largely, unprotected from sabotage is the basis of a gripping tale.
Irish Journalist and Playwright, Anthony Fennell, is assigned to cover the cable and the repair process in the event of a break. He joins Conway, who was born on Ratlin Island, Northern Ireland, on board the Georges. As luck would have it, report of a break was received and the Georges set sail.
McCann presents a cast of characters thrown together in a common profession in tight quarters where a lot is not said.
Conway's past creates curiosity and the relationship with Zanele, a South African actress who goes to London to pursue her artistic career adds to the mystery.
As the title might suggest- there is a TWIST.