Excerpt from Twist by Colum McCann, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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 information was carried in fragile tubes on the seafloor. Most of us thought that the cloud was in the air, she said, but satellites accounted for only a trickle of internet traffic. The muddy wires at the bottom of the sea were faster, cheaper, and infinitely more effective than anything up there in the sky. On occasion the tubes broke, and there was a small fleet of ships in various ports around the world charged with repair, often spending months at sea. Was I interested, she asked, in exploring the story?

It was fascinating to think that an email or a photograph or a film could travel at near the speed of light in the watery darkness, and that the tubes sometimes had to be fixed, but my sense of the technology was limited, and it was all still a perplexing series of ones and zeros for me. I demurred.

Flattery has a double edge. I was not sure if I should be offended when Sachini called me the following week and insisted that I was one of the few writers capable of getting to the murky underdepths. She told me that, in some of her ongoing excavations, she had found a ship, the Georges Lecointe, that was purported to be among the busiest cable repair vessels in the world. It held the record for the number of deep-sea jobs in the Atlantic Ocean. She reminded me that I had specifically said that I was interested in the idea of repair. Tikkun olam, she called it, a concept I was not familiar with at the time. But repair was certainly what I craved. She also corralled me with the simple fact that the boat had been called in to help recover the black box of Air India Flight 182, destroyed by a bomb off the southwest coast of Ireland in 1985. More than three hundred people were killed and most of the bodies were never recovered. I had been fourteen years old at the time of the bombing, and I recall a photograph of an Irish policeman carrying a child's doll through the airport. It intrigued me to think that a small black box stuffed with statistics and information could be hauled from the bottom of the ocean, but the bodies could not.

I walked along the Dublin coast. So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires. I had been an athlete once, a middle-distance runner. I had taken risks. Gone distances. Now I watched those in swimming togs who actually braved the cold water, and I envied them their courage. The sea tightened my eyes. For how long had I been walking around in the same set of clothes? I called Sachini. She hardly buoyed me when she said that a stint at sea might freshen me up, but she salved my mood with a decent word count and a generous budget.

I began my descent into the very tubes I wanted to portray. The owner of the Georges Lecointe was a telecommunications company in Brussels. The press department told me they were open to a visit from a journalist working in the international sphere. This, in retrospect, was quite naïve on their part, but they had languished publicity-wise in recent years, and they were engaged in several cable-laying bids with Facebook and Google—both of which were due to lay huge cables in the seas around Africa—and possibly thought that an article might raise their profile. It turned out that they owned a number of the world's working cables: their insignia was a purple globe wrapped in spinning coils of wire.

Excerpted from Twist by Colum McCann. Copyright © 2025 by Colum McCann. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.