Twist - A Novel

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER An urgent [and] ingenious (The New York Times Book Review) 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

The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean. Salman Rushdie

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.

Rezension:

Enigmatic and urgent . . . ingenious . . . McCann, author of the National Book Award winning Let the Great World Spin, clearly knows what he s up to. The New York Times Book Review

Told with McCann s incomparable prose, Twist opens a window into an obscure way people on earth are connected, told by a man who is himself fairly broken. . . . Gorgeously written and sad and inspiring. The Boston Globe

Genuinely haunting and sometimes thrilling . . . There are also plenty of genuinely gorgeous passages about the way people are translated into dots of light in our information-based economy. As usual, McCann is sensitive to the fluid nature of oppression across history and countries. The Washington Post

Tantalizing. The Minnesota Star-Tribune

An exploration of hidden depths told in shimmering prose. The Economist

McCann explores, as ever, the mystery of what it is to be human and what holds us all together. For this he has picked the ultimate metaphor the way our connections and the mass of information vital to our lives thrums through glass fibers smaller than a hair deep under the ocean. . . . This is a Gatsby story for the information age. Anna Funder

Colum McCann gives us a powerfully realist novel of men at sea, literally, emotionally, and metaphorically. It speaks of the brokenness of our time, the successful and unsuccessful attempts at repairs, and the vulnerability of our world. The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean. Salman Rushdie

Masterfully woven and delicately layered, and told with such calm wisdom that it will take your breath away, Twist is engrossing, deeply moving and consistently honest. Colum McCann is one of our greatest storytellers. Elif Shafak

McCann may follow Coppola upriver and Conrad to the heart of darkness, but the concerns of his novel are contemporary and urgent and utterly compelling. T his is an ambitious novel, note-perfect, wild but controlled, with its deft apparatus mapping our most mysterious twenty-first-century malaise the great loneliness of the connected world. Kevin Barry

What a beautiful, sparkling book this is. Another astounding novel from a fiction master. Kirkus Reviews, starred review

An intriguing story of a journalist sent to report on the complex work of repairing the underwater cables that carry the world s information . . . McCann skillfully ratchets up the uneasiness on board and later adds a provocative twist, taking the novel in an unexpected direction. Readers will be dazzled. Publishers Weekly, starred review

Each line is keenly crafted and every element is momentous in McCann s ravishing deep dive into connectivity and estrangement, power and plunder, protest and sabotage, creativity and madness. Booklist, starred review