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Twist: A Novel Audiobook
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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.
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"[Colum] McCann (Apeirogon (2021), a writer of ardent empathy and global perception, considers profound aspects of brokenness and repair in a breath-held novel pulsing with echoes of Joseph Conrad freshly illuminating our time of polluted oceans, internet clamor, and perilous polarization. . . . 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
Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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. This is an ambitious novel, note perfect, wild but controlled, with its deft apparatus mapping our most mysterious 21st century malaise—the great loneliness of the connected world.
— Kevin Barry -
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) -
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. This 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 -
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. This 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) -
McCann (Apeirogon (2021), a writer of ardent empathy and global perception, considers profound aspects of brokenness and repair in a breath-held novel pulsing with echoes of Joseph Conrad freshly illuminating our time of polluted oceans, internet clamor, and perilous polarization…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 -
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
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About Colum McCann
Colum McCann is the author of several books, including This Side of Brightness, Zoli, Songdogs and Let the Great World Spin. He has received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and was named the first winner of the Grace Kelly Memorial Foundation Award and the Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award.