"Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."

This novel is thought-provoking, memorable, and beautifully written. 

Twist is written in the style of a memoir, from the point of view of a writer who is going through some rough times in his personal life. In this narrative, Anthony Fennell is working as a free lance journalist, joining a crew at sea who are repairing underwater cables that ensure Internet usage for large portions of the world. There is a strong metaphor running through this story about how this long trip helps Fennell to repair himself, as he watches the crew repair deeply buried cables.

Before and during this voyage, Fennell develops an interesting relationship with the man in charge of the exhibition, John Conway. This man is at the heart of this story, an enigma who keeps Fennell focused outside of himself and searching for answers to the mystery surrounding Conway's identity and motives. 

One aspect I found fascinating about this story was free diving, and the depths that some people can go by training their bodies, using no scuba gear. 

Twist is indeed a deep novel, no pun intended, and I am very glad that I had the chance to read this. Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for providing me with this experience in exchange for an honest review. 

“The disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface.”

Colum McCann’s Twist is a novel that pulls you under like a deep-sea current—fluid, immersive, and utterly consuming. The writing is stunning, a hypnotic blend of existential reflection, fractured identity, and philosophical musings on connection and disconnection, both digital and human. This was my first McCann novel, but by the time I finished, I knew I’d be devouring everything else he has ever written.

The novel follows Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist tasked with covering the repair of the world’s underwater cables—the delicate fibre-optic lifelines that carry our collective digital existence across the ocean floor. But as he journeys to the West African coast and boards a cable repair ship, his assignment becomes something far greater: a meditation on human fragility, the ghosts of colonialism, and the invisible threads that bind us together and just as easily unravel.

One of the book’s most striking relationships is between Fennell and John Conway, an enigmatic engineer and free diver who seems to exist in the liminal spaces between past and present, land and sea, destruction and repair. His connection with Zanele, a South African actress on her own journey of self-definition, adds another layer of depth to the novel’s intricate web of longing, loss, and reinvention.

Thematically, Twist is about rupture and repair—of cables, of relationships, of entire histories. It’s a book that asks whether broken things can ever truly be made whole again, or whether we’re all just “shards in the smash-up,” as one of McCann’s breath-taking lines puts it. The novel is rich with aphoristic brilliance:

 “Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over.”

McCann’s prose has a way of making the philosophical feel intimate, of turning big, sweeping ideas into something deeply personal. His sentences shimmer with poetic intensity, making even the simplest moments feel profound. And yet, for all its lyricism, there is a sharp precision to his storytelling. The book is tightly wound, the tension building not just in the external world of severed cables and geopolitical tremors but in the internal lives of its characters, all of whom are searching for something just beyond their reach.

If I had one complaint, it would be that the book’s final act slows down, lingering perhaps a touch too long in its deconstructions of meaning and memory. But even then, McCann never loses sight of the pulse beneath the words—the ache of wanting to belong, the hunger for connection, the inevitable entropy of all things.

Ultimately, Twist is a masterful exploration of how we hold ourselves together in a world built on fracture. It’s a book about the things we try to fix, the things we choose to let go of, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep going. In short: an absolute must-read.

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

Thank you to Bloomsbury & NetGalley for the ARC. Twist will be published on March 25, 2025.

This is a novel about how information travels, and on some level, about how we interpret and analyze information. The protagonist spends the majority of the novel trying - and ultimately failing - to gather information and decode an enigmatic man named Conway. For the protagonist, Conway is a puzzle to be solved. Unfortunately for me, Conway’s background or motivations did not interest me. He didn’t leap off the page as a mystery to unfurl for me, and therefore the plot dragged.

In the end, the protagonist and his white whale Conway were both unlikeable. There’s some complicated language when the protagonist, a European, describes South Africa and Ghana - two places I’ve had the extreme pleasure to live and experience. The pacing of the novel is somewhat irregular, as Part Four reads very differently to Parts One through Three. 

I picked up this book on the merit of McCann’s prose, which is always strong. I also love thinking about the ocean in new ways, so I appreciated this as an interesting contrast to Julia Armfield’s “Our Wives Under the Sea,” which I had read recently. 

This is a fascinating book, giving the reader insight into something they probably never thought too much about previously.  It's about the people and process of fixing underwater sea cables. The underlining themes are connection and disconnection in modern times.    
There is a lot of technical detail, especially about free diving and it really makes you feel like you are on the ship that carries out the repairs.  

It's an interesting technique for the narration, which probably has a name.  The narrator is a writer and he is commissioned to write an article on how repairs happen to these cables.  So the story unfolds as he does his research on it.  He brings you through what he is thinking about the characters as their action unfolds.  And when you get to read the acknowledgements at the end, its hard to decipher if this is Colum McCann or the narrator writing.  

There is a bit of a twist in the story, but I was not sure whether that is enough to generate the title.  But I am looking forward to see the author as part of the book tour, so hopefully will learn more. 

Overall, a combination of the uniqueness of the story and the style of narrator hooked me in from the first page .  

Available on 6th March.  I was GIFTED a free e-ARC from @bloomsburypublishing via @netgalley 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Genre: Literary Fiction

I have two books by Colum McCann on my wishlist. Both Apeirogon and TransAtlantic have been on my wishlist for quite some time. When I had the chance to get a preapproved copy of his latest novel, “Twist,” I jumped at the opportunity and decided to explore his newer work, and I’m glad I did.

Although it doesn’t explicitly state in the synopsis, Twist is a modern reimagining of The Great Gatsby. The story follows an Irish journalist and playwright, Thomas Fennell, who is assigned to cover the underwater internet cables, their maintenance, and recovery. During his journey, he meets engineer John Conway and his love interest, Zanele, a South African actress. 

The story delves into the narrator’s relationship with those two characters, as well as many more complex themes of our time that are well contrasted when compared. For instance, it examines the ironic dilemma of how the fiber-optic cables under the sea serve to bring people closer together, yet in reality, individuals are becoming emotionally distant. 

Another similarity between this book and The Great Gatsby is that the narrator doesn’t feel reliable enough. He didn’t seem deceivable to me or anything like that, but as I progressed through the story, I could sense that he was withholding information, like not telling the other characters that he had a son. 

The plot itself is not the strongest aspect of this book because the story relies more on character development. The book has a slow pace, and I understand the reason for this deliberate choice. Personally, both the plot and theme are outside my usual reading comfort zone. However, it is the excellent writing, with its lyrical and thoughtful prose, that elevated this book for me. I truly enjoyed the author’s poetic writing style and look forward to reading more of his works.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.

I tend to enjoy anything Colum McCann writes and Twist was no exception. Who k ew the world of underwater cables and the complicated people who fix them could be such an interesting novel?