**INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “urgent [and] ingenious” ( Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Apeirogon, TransAtlantic, Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as three critically acclaimed story collections and the nonfiction books Letters to a Young Writer and American Mother. A regular contributor to The New York Times, he lives with his family in New York City. He is the co-founder of the global nonprofit organization Narrative 4, which operates in forty-two countries and uses storytelling to propel community action and change.

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “urgent [and] ingenious” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the acclaimed 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

**A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: *Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage

“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.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

We are all shards in the smash-up.

Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.

I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days—we have all had our difficulties with the shape of the truth, and I am not going to claim myself as any exception. But others have tried to tell Conway’s story and, so far as I know, they got it largely wrong. For the most part, he moved quietly and without much fuss, but his was a lantern heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared.

I am quite sure that I will hear the name of Conway again and again in the years to come: what happened to him, what strange forces worked upon him, how he was wrecked in the pursuit of love, how he fooled himself into believing that he was something he was not, how we fooled ourselves in return, and how he kept spiraling inward and downward. Then again, maybe Conway was just being honest to the times, interpreting the present in light of the past, and perhaps he got it correct in some way.

I am not sure that anybody, anywhere, is truly aware of what lay at the core of Conway and the era he, and we, lived through—it was a time of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.

When all is said and done, the websites and platforms and rumor mills will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts, and we will piece together whatever sort of Conway we can to suit ourselves. Still, I’d at least like to try to tell a small part of his story, alongside my own, and alongside Zanele’s too, and if I take liberties with the gaps, then so be it. Like so many people nowadays, I’d prefer to sweep the memory of those days under the carpet. That I have made my mistakes is hardly unique. Maybe I tell this story to get rid of it, or to open up the silence, or to salve my own conscience, or perhaps I tell it because I am scared of what I too have become, steeped in regret and saudade. I often lie awake wondering what might have been if I had done things just a little differently. The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.

In January 2019 I boarded the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair vessel. For a struggling novelist and occasional playwright, it was a relief to step away from the burden of invention onto a ship that would take me out to the west coast of Africa, a place I’d never been before. The center of the world was slipping, my career felt stagnant, and frankly, at my age, I was unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore.

I thought I would spend a few weeks on the ship, then return to Dublin and write a long-form journalistic piece, shake out the cobwebs. My first two novels had been minor successes, and I had written a couple of plays, but in recent years I had fallen into a clean, plain silence. The days had piled into weeks and the weeks had piled into months. Not much sang to me: no characters, no plotlines. The world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward. As a cure, I had thought that I would try to write a simple love story for the stage, but it turned out to be a soliloquy of solitude, not a love story at all. I shut the laptop one morning. All my characters slipped into a chasm. I cast around for new ideas, but mostly it was fall and echo, echo and fall.

Everything felt out of season. I was drinking heavily, breaking covenants, refusing my obligations to the page. I bought myself an antique typewriter in an attempt to get back to basics, but the keys stuck and the carriage return broke.

So many of my days had been a haze. In my most recent novel I had been treading memory: the farmhouse, a small red light from the Sacred Heart, my father rising early to tend the farm, my mother trapped by shadows on the landing, my rural upbringing, my escape to London, the sunsets over the Thames, the journey home, the descent into suburban Dublin where the streetlamps flickered.

Some of the novel had been autobiographical, but the fictional elements were truer. All the truth, my father told me, but none of the honesty. I recall him stepping rather apologetically from the Galway theater where the book was launched. Rain on the cobblestones. Exit ghost.

I had a feeling that I had exhausted myself and that if I was ever going to write again, I would have to get out into the world. What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.

I had no interest in cables. Not in the beginning, in any case. In the one article I eventually wrote, I said that a cable was a cable until it was broken, and then, like the rest of us, it became something else.

Sachini, my editor at an online magazine where I did occasional work, called me one cold autumn afternoon. She spoke in long, looping sentences. She had happened upon a news report of a cable break in Vietnam and had been surprised to learn that nearly all the world’s intercontinental informatio…