Twist

October 1, 2024

National Book Award winner McCann (Let the Great World Spin) writes a new novel about Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, whose piece about underwater cables becomes the vehicle to explore the fundamental questions of humanity. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 9, 2024
National Book Award winner McCann (Apeirogon) offers an intriguing story of a journalist sent to report on the complex work of repairing the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. Anthony Fennell, 48, a struggling novelist and heavy drinker, flies to Cape Town to board a cable repair ship, hoping the assignment will boost his stagnating career. He meets fellow Irishman John Conway, the chief of mission, and John’s girlfriend, Zanele Ombassa, a promising Black South African actor who soon leaves for England to be in a play. Conway will be dead not long after the reporting assignment ends, Fennell tells the reader, and his narration amounts to an attempt to make sense of what happened after they embarked to fix a series of cable breaks. The mission grows particularly fraught when Conway determines that a cable is broken at the bottom of an underwater canyon, far too deep to dive, and attempts to recover it with a grappling hook (“A trip to Hades armed with a piece of steel,” as Fennell describes the operation). Conway then learns Zanele has been attacked onstage and is in the hospital, but cannot leave the ship because they’re too far from shore. 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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from January 1, 2025
Fennell, a cranky, hard-drinking Irish writer, takes a freelance gig reporting on a ship and crew dedicated to repairing the deep-sea fiber-optic cables that carry the digital cacaphony the world relies on. Fennell flies to Cape Town to meet enigmatic mission chief Conway, and becomes intrigued and perturbed by him and his partner, Zanele, an actress and environmental activist who grew up in a Black township. As Fennell accompanies Conway on a quest to find and fix a ruptured cable that is causing mass disruption and panic, Zanele leaves for England, to stage a production of Waiting for Godot recast as a "climate play." 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 that freshly illuminate our time of polluted oceans, internet clamor, and perilous polarization. As the arduous voyage pushes Conway over the edge and Zanele endures violence on the way to fame, Fennell slowly achieves self-repair and reconnection. 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. "Everything is made to be disassembled. Not all of it can be repaired. All there is is the trying."

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 15, 2025
A (fictional) Irish writer explores brokenness in McCann's latest. Anthony Fennell is at sea. Not literally, at least at first. The Irish writer and narrator of McCann's latest novel finds himself with a "stagnant" career and "unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore." He's drinking too much and writing too little. "What I needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair," he says. He gets it when a magazine editor asks him to profile a crew that repairs breaks in the underwater cables carrying information across continents. Fennell soon sets off to South Africa to meet fellow Irishman John Conway, the chief of mission for theGeorges Lecointe, a ship that works in the Atlantic Ocean. Fennell sets sail with Conway and his crew after a series of ruptures in cables near Congo; at first, he is beset by seasickness, but soon rallies and learns as much as he can about Conway. It's not much; the engineer and diver plays his cards close to the vest. He opens up a little after his partner, a Black South African actress named Zanele, is viciously attacked in England. But not long after, the crew is rocked by a disappearance, and Fennell goes back to South Africa, unsure what to make of his stint on the sea. This is a deeply interior novel, and McCann does an elegant job depicting Fennell as a man wrestling with something that might be a midlife crisis, but might be something much deeper. As usual, his writing astounds; McCann hasn't lost the shining prose that marked his earlier novels likeLet the Great World Spin (2009). What a beautiful, sparkling book this is. Another astounding novel from a fiction master.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.