Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and failing novelist, gets an assignment about the undersea cables that carry the internet, and joins a repair ship off the west coast of Africa. The chief of mission is John Conway, a freediver and cable engineer, precise, private, and hard to read. When a cable breaks and the world goes partly dark, they sail out to lift it and splice it. Then Conway disappears. McCann uses the whole thing as a figure for connection and its failure, and the cable-ship material — how a broken thread three miles down actually gets found and repaired — is the best reporting in the book.
Twist: A Novel