AN INDIE BESTSELLER
“What a beautiful, sparkling book this is. Another astounding novel from a fiction master.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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 fibre-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at unfathomable depths.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labour 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.
COLUM McCANN is the author of five novels and two collections of stories. He has won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award for Irish Literature and the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year award. His short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar. His fiction has been published in over thirty languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, the Paris Review and Bomb, among other publications. His novel Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. McCann lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their three children. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Visit his website at www.colummccann.com.View all by Colum McCann
