3,5
‘Twist’ is largely a novel about ‘repair’. Repair of a cables, repair of people (Fennell, Conway), and repair of relationships. I enjoyed and raced through the topical story, but had some trouble with the characters. They’re interesting enough, but I felt I didn’t really got to know them. The Conway mystery (why he did what he did) remains mostly unsolved as well which was somewhat frustrating in the end.
Thank you Bloomsbury and Netgalley UK for the ARC

Apeirogon by Colum McCann published in 2020 was an unforgettable read - a story about friendship in a divided world.

So a new book was very much welcome- Twist - is very different. Slow, brooding, taut and slightly unsettling.

Anthony Fennell is a writer who cannot surpass a mental block in his creative thinking so takes up the opportunity to travel on the George Lecointe- a boat that travels out in to deep waters to repair damaged fibre optic cables that run along the ocean beds- the true World Wide Web.

The leader of the repair ship is George Conway- an enigmatic man - who is partnered to the equally alluring Zanele- an actress.

As the journey progresses, Fennell is overcome with seasickness and a sense of isolation ; not fully fitting in. Events take a turn when Conway goes missing- Has he accidentally drowned ? Did he take his own life? Has he faked his disappearance ?

It is hard to describe what the true message of the book is- is it a tale of an eco warrior ? Is it the story of a splintered world held together by tiny threads as communication becomes even more fractured?

Much will be written about this novel- this is a highly metaphorical story . On a personal level, it was challenging to connect or feel warmth towards the key characters as all were elusive and searching for meaning in self identity. A fascinating glimpse into an unknown world.

Thought- provoking and crafted by a master .Sadly, it didn't grip as much as hoped.
3..5 out of 5.

Colum McCann's latest novel tells the story of a man sent to write a story on the industry of underwater cable repairers. If this sounds disappointing, it truly isn't. McCann is such a great writer, and is able to spin out of this such an engaging story. What starts as the story of a man investigating the underwater cabling industry turns into an elegy on human connection, colonialism and our fragile life. This is a very absorbing read which I finished in one sitting. Highly recommended.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

3.5 stars

Many thanks to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for this ARC ebook.

A fascinating deep dive into the world of deep sea cables connecting the world

The premise had me hooked, and I was delighted to receive a free review ebook to read. Unfortunately, it’s told in a rather distant third-person narrative, which makes it difficult to connect with any character and the story itself. While the narration is full of beautiful prose, the pacing is a plodder and not at all gripping. For all of that, I did find the information about deep sea data cables both fascinating and scary in how easy they are to damage. Until this book, I’d assumed most of our communications travelled via satellites these days, but—nope—we still rely on cables which run along the sea bed.

Here are some lines that stood out for me …


‘The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.’

And …

‘Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.’

And …

‘A new cable would make billions of dollars for its owners. It was also quite possible that the information within was owned or tapped, or both. The old colonialism was dressed up in a tube and it snaked the floors of our unsilent seas.’

And …

‘The days come and go. They bird themselves against the window and end up at our feet, stunned.’

In summary, this is a story about a broken writer, two broken cables, and a broken man who repairs those vital deep sea communications systems. If you like a slow burn with lots of fascinating insights into this technology and a glimpse into the human mind, I’d say give this book a go. For me it gets 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 for rating purposes, which is a positive review. (See my notes below.)


***

NOTE ON RATINGS: I consider a 3-star rating a positive review. Picky about which books I give 5 stars to, I reserve this highest rating for the stories I find stunning and which moved me.


5 STARS: IT WAS AMAZING! I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN! — Highly Recommended.

4 STARS: I WOULD PULL AN ALL-NIGHTER — Go read this book.

3 STARS: IT WAS GOOD! — An okay read. Didn’t love it. Didn’t hate it.

2 STARS: I MAY HAVE LIKED A FEW THINGS —Lacking in some areas: writing, characterisation, and/or problematic plot lines.

1 STAR: NOT MY CUP OF TEA —Lots of issues with this book.

“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.

The narrator in this book is an author and journalist, who gets a task to write about undersea optic cable repairs, and joins a boat with this in mind. The story, in typical post-modern style, is more about the narrator and one of the people he meets on his assignment, with the narrative itself jumping back and forth across timelines and events, illuminating more and more of the protagonists' tortured souls, weaving in criticism of the awful impact humans have on the environment.

Overall, the story is well written, and there is even a whiff of a thriller within it. The fact that it doesn't really tell a specific story, and instead just follows the tribulations of a single individual comes across quite well, despite the risk of being overly contrived.

The main issue with this book, as with many others in this style, is that it's not really about anything. I rather enjoyed reading it, but I'm not really sure what I read and why I should have read it in the first instance. The book, as a representative of its genre, is great. It's the genre itself I struggle with. For me, personally, it comes across as pompous and self absorbed.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

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

I very much enjoyed this, the writing, of course is superb. The story is one of a man searching to find the ground beneath his feet, which is odd, considering his journey is not planned on land! Aside from the inner growth and slow uncovering of why Fennel feels he needs to seek out answers on the other end of the world, this is a book about a place so far removed from life as I would know it (Africa, the pandemic etc) - I lost myself in this book, the otherness of it, more so perhaps than the personal journey, rather the world view and of course Mc Cann's writing kept me rapt.
Very happy to recommend and post on GR (doesn't seem to be there yet?!) and amazon, when published.
thanks to Bloomsbury for an absorbing read.

I love Colum McCann's writing and in this respect, the book didn't disappoint. His observations about Africa, lockdown and London life will stay with me. The book has in my view a lot in common with Orbital, a forensic insight into a world that is alien to everyday life as we know it, yet vital to it. In this case that world is a ship that repairs undersea internet cables on missions that can last months at a time. I found the characters in Twist much more engaging than those in Orbital and for that reason have give 4 stars instead of 3. But like Orbital, I found myself disappointed by the lack of plot, and there was so much here that could have made the story gripping. Instead, the book often reads like long-form journalism. Perhaps this is intentional given the protagonist's trade. But a novel of this length, I think, needs more story. And a better 'twist' would have jumped it up to 5 stars! Nevertheless, do read it.

Colum McCann’s previous novel “Apeirogon” (the first I have read) was an outstanding treatment of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in both its deeply empathetic content and innovative literary form. He previously with his novel “Let The Great World Spin” won both the US National Book Award and later the Dublin Literary Award.

Of this novel he has said “For me it's a new sort of book in the sense that it's quite straightforward and chronological. Often I write in a kaleidoscopic way and use several different narrators, but this one takes place with only one narrator.” – a narrator he has also said was inspired by Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby “a straightforward earnest voice of someone trying to make sense of the world, who has a penchant and desire to tell a story that is bigger than himself and yet at the same time trying to work out some of his own inner demons.”

The narrator is Anthony Fennell – an Irish writer, self-described struggling-novelist and occasional playwright, his own demons (we find out over time) being a descent into alcoholism after his wife Irenea (a Chilean choreographer) left him and returned to Chile with their a year and a half old son Joli, resisting any attempts at reconciliation and forging a new relationship (his son happy to call another man his father).

Fennell resolves sometime late 2018 that “What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.” and accepts an online magazine commission to write about the undersea tubes that carry the world’s internet traffic

Specifically, he is to join the Georges Lecointe – one of the world’s leading cable repair vessels and in early 2019 he travels to Cape Town to join up with the ship.

It has to be said that the seemingly incidental period Fennell spends in Cape Town before joining the vessel contains some outstanding writing. Fennell is alarmed at the gaping inequality he sees there and much as he wants to play as an Irishman the “colonial-victim not coloniser card” he realises that the racial underpinnings of the inequality: “After apartheid, I had thought Cape Town might be ashamed of itself, in the choke hold of history, riven still by all it had seen and heard and done. Maybe it was, but it hid that side well, or maybe I hid myself from it. There was a nod to the past just about everywhere—statues of Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba songs blasted out over intercoms, memory museums, rows of colorful banners—but apartheid’s successor was quite obviously itself.” make that impossible and there is a simply brilliant line when he becomes uncomfortably aware of his colour privilege in a hotel bar:

"At the bar I had a Jameson to rebalance myself, but even the giant ice cube was an accusation: all the straight edges, Sykes-Picot in a glass."

One of those lines so good, in my view, that it justifies the novel in and of itself.

He is in the bar to meet the person that we know from the first page is the other real heart of the novel – John A Conway (we also know his fate given the first page says “I am not here to make an elegy for …” and discusses the wreckage of his life.

Conway is the quietly charismatic chief of mission on the George Lecointe – also Irish (although vague about his origins), not entirely keen on the distraction of Fennell joining his ship on its next repair, and keener that Fennell writers about his partner – Zanele an actress from township origins who is quickly gaining an internet following, and who is about to take an all-female climate change interpretation of “Waiting for Godot” (she cleverly quotes lines from the play which fit her theme) to Brighton. She is travelling there with her young children and Fennell senses not everything is right in her relationship with Conway.

When a tumultuous Congo River flood (the Congo parallels with “Heart of Darkness” are deliberate and also drawn in the novel) triggers offshore mudslides, a number of calamitous breeches occur in the underground cables causing internet outages across the African coast, and the Georges Lecointe sets out for a number of repairs – two off the DRC coast, the other closer to shore in Ghana.

Much of the middle of the book is set on the ship – and we learn of the crew onboard the vessel and the methods used to repair the cables. Fennell meanwhile becomes a little obsessed with seeming inconsistencies in Conway’s past and in his relationship with Zanele and the latter takes a twist when Zanele is subject to an acid attack while performing in Britain (her profile inadvertently growing as a result).

I enjoyed the shipbound sections – the back stories of the crew, Fennell’s tentative attempts to recontact his son, his researches into Conway and Zanele, all alongside the ongoing repair work is sufficiently varied to maintain interest and also fits what again is acknowledged explicitly as the themes both of the article Fennell is striving to write and McCann’s novel: the ideas of repair and communication, the contradiction in that the internet has if anything lead to greater isolation and loneliness and so that in trying to repair a breach in global communication the crew may be achieving the opposite in terms of personal relationships.

He also reflects on both the past of the wires – in colonial telegraphic communication, and the future in how they are increasingly owned by the new colonialists – internet monopolists.

As they approach their easier near shore repair off Accra, Conway suddenly disappears and I have to say the novel took a couple of turns that did not work for me. Firstly there is an extended set of references to a scene in Apocalypse Now which I have to say were 100% lost on me (in simple terms I don’t watch films at all so am always lost by cinematic references – and this one persists for a good chunk of the novel).

I enjoyed Fennell’s time in Accra trying to craft his article (see opening quote) – he has a series of ambiguous communications with Zanele (who seems to know more of Conway’s fate than she is prepared to let on and who explains more of his and her complex pasts) and some equally ambiguous exchanges with someone that comes to cook in the residence he rents while he finalises his writing

The penultimate part of the novel (before an epilogue which pulls things together) takes a more dramatic turn as a series of sabotage events occur against the undersea cables – and it becomes clear over time that Conway is the likely perpetuator.

While there was a lot to like in the concept of Conway turning to sabotage this part of the book took on for me too much of a thriller aspect as Fennell tries to recreate in his writing Conway’s actions – here for someone like me who has never had any interest in scuba or any other form of diving or hearing other people talk about it (there is nothing like a diver for boring you with their hobby) and who is also, as a reader, rather averse to sections which contain little other than physical descriptions – this part was the worst of both worlds and exactly what I was fearing but did not really occur in the earlier sections on the Georges Lecointe.

I would say in remediation though that much of the action takes place in lockdown and there are some brilliant passages on the temporal phenomenon of that time: “The days come and go. They bird themselves against the window and end up at our feet, stunned.” And “The clocks fell in upon themselves. Everything went fast and everything went slow at the same time. Months leapfrogged one another. Even whole years seemed to disappear. Time stepped up behind us and delivered a blow to the back of our heads. Logic was mangled. The times were concussed.”

Overall, therefore and despite my reservations when the book strays too close to filmic or thriller territory, this is a novel which packs huge amounts into its only 250 or so pages, contains some memorable characters and ideas and some stunning sentences.

McCann has twice been Booker longlisted (the first time for Transatlantic, the second Apeirogon whose failure to make the shortlist was decidedly to the demerit of the prize) and I would not be surprised and far from disappointed to see a third longlisting here.

I was completely intrigued by the premise of Twist and it’s unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s a novel that not only draws you in but also makes you stop and think with a plot that moves along at pace. Thank you to NetGalley, Bloomsbury api Publishing and the author for the chance to review.

In Twist, Anthony Fennell embarks on a journey to Cape Town with a singular objective: to locate and board the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by the enigmatic and charismatic Chief of Mission, John Conway. As the boat navigates the west coast of Africa, Fennell immerses himself in the routines and rituals of life at sea, anticipating an adventure that soon takes a dark turn.

As the mission begins to falter, it becomes evident that Conway is grappling with a personal crisis, and a tragic, violent event looms in his past on land. When Conway suddenly disappears, Fennell is propelled into a quest to find him. His search unravels the profound complexities of human nature, forcing him to confront the unsettling reality that some bonds may be better severed than preserved.

Twist is a tightly woven narrative that skillfully balances suspense with introspective prose. The author’s writing shines, revealing the emotional depth and moral contradictions that lie within the human heart. This compelling exploration of relationships and the human condition makes Twist a thought-provoking and engaging read.

Read more at The Secret Bookreview.

We follow an Irish journalist and writer, Anthony.
He is writing a piece on the underwater cables, and through these cables and the characters he meets, such as Conway, the chief of the cable repair ship, his love interest, and we read a meditation on life via Anthony’s words.
I found the idea of the underwater cable networks as the setting and carrier of human stories, both the physical and metaphorical aspects of them extremely intriguing.
I also enjoyed Anthony’s observations, most of his arc, and ruminations.
Prose and characterisation 3.5
Premise 3
Setting and themes 4
Certainly a worthy read.