I had mixed feelings when I started this book. I knew about the cables under water from my first job, where we depended on those cables to reach South Africa and the Middle East, back then they were called a telex, which eventually became so much more. So I was a little interested in learning about how they fixed them.

Along the way way in the story there was so much more, the characters and the other storylines were well received and I enjoyed them as well.

I have mixed feelings about the book, but it was a good read.

I want to thank NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House for this advanced reader copy and this is my honest opinion.

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

RECOMMENDED

Colum McCann has penned a novel about broken things and those who fix them. The story begins as an Irish journalist is given the opportunity to write an article about the repairers of underwater fiber-optic cables. There are ships stationed around the world with repair crews for these emergencies; the best is captained by a man named Conway and is off the coast of Africa. Our journalist joins the crew on this ship for an extended repair mission.
McCann’s beautifully written novel will appeal to all environmentalists, as it details the poor conditions of the seas after years of neglect. But the seas and the fiber optic cables are not the only broken things in this novel—relationships play an important role in the book. As the crew battles the elements and tries to find the broken cables, raw emotions bubble to the surface, brought on by the long journey to reconnect the world’s severed communication lines. It’s an adventure, a love story, a mystery and an environmental synopsis rolled into one story.
This book was a slow read for me as I needed to savor McCann’s beautiful writings. Sometimes I am awed by the workings of writer’s brains—that was the case with this novel.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for an advanced copy of this book. My opinions are my own.

As Twist, Colum McCann’s newest novel, opens, Anthony Fennell, an Irish writer struggling with alcohol and career stagnation, has reluctantly agreed to write a long-form journalistic piece on the Georges Lecointe, one of the busiest cable repair vessels in the world, for an online magazine. The ship is docked in Cape Town but heads out to sea whenever there is breakage in the vital submarine cables that run along the ocean floor and convey most of the world’s digital communication data.

Arriving in South Africa and awaiting an opportunity to observe a cable repair operation, Fennell meets fellow Irishman John Conway, the ship’s enigmatic chief of mission. Conway invites Fennell home to meet his magnetic partner, Zanele, a South African actress busy preparing for her own journey. She is on her way to England to perform in a climate change–focused adaptation of Waiting for Godot. Although this trio will be together in a room only this one time, their lives will interlace with the same themes of fracture and renewal as the subterranean cables that the repair ship seeks to locate and mend. All three characters are emerging from shadowy, complicated pasts, and each is poised on the brink of utter transformation. The rest of the novel traces their very different trajectories.

With his always elegant prose, Colum McCann is one of those rare writers that successfully arcs back and forth between the wide-angle perspective (global and societal concerns) and its opposite, the sharply focused close-up on individuals and their specific and complicated human lives. His novels expand and contract in an almost breath-like manner. Like his free-diving characters, McCann is willing to risk plunging into the depths in the hope of better articulating what exists in the dimmer reaches of the human heart: “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.”

McCann uses the classic literary motif of a sea expedition, with quiet nods to Conrad and Melville, and it’s no coincidence that the crew of the Georges Lecointe sets out to trace fractured communication links. The journey also provides an opportunity for reflection on the complicated relationship between human society and the planet. Undersea cables transmit the whole of human digital information—the flotsam and jetsam of societal interaction from the most precious artistic endeavors to the millions of bytes of spam and pornography. When a storm off the Congo coast disrupts the ocean floor and breaks communication cables, Fennell envisions the sea spewing up remnants of human and natural history: “Drowned boats, cars, bicycles, cows, hydraulic jacks, fertilizer bags, spears, pirogues, seeds, insects, birds, old paddle wheels.”

The plot of Twist follows several interweaving strands. It chronicles the voyage of the repair ship on its quest to find the two cable breaks located off the coasts of Ghana and the Congo. It moves into stranger territory after a surprising disappearance leads to a shocking act of ecoterrorism. A less comfortable strand for this reader follows Fennell’s close attention to Zanele’s life in London. As he scarcely knows her, his fascination reads as unearned intimacy, just as his insistence on calling her by Conway’s pet-name for her, Zee, demonstrates a curious lack of boundaries. The discordance is most likely intentional on McCann’s part and brings to mind a quote from another of his novels, Let the Great World Spin: “People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.”

Throughout the novel, McCann emphasizes that life is built on cycles of rupture and repair. At sea, without the usual distractions and escapes, it becomes harder to avoid facing one’s demons. Fennell’s path towards wholeness is crooked and incomplete, but he is ultimately able to take tentative steps towards change and reconnection. Others may not be as fortunate. There are some breakages that cannot be mended and some actions that cannot be understood. As Conway notes, inevitably, “Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

This review will appear in the May 7, 2025 edition of BookBrowse https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/ref/pr320000

Even when it starts to get a little bit dull, Colum slips in a thought-provoking clue to what is to come. And you are propelled to read on. The stream of consciousness parts were my favorite and connected me in the moment.
As a reader I was left asking “ Why!?”- but then I realized that the characters were also asking the same question. so really I immersed in the ocean, along with the cable. A Cable that before reading Twist I was ignorant of, but alway grateful for.

I can see why some people would like this book, but I had mixed feelings. It felt like there was a lot of wind up for little return. Also, the premise seems pretty unlikely, the narrator is flown to spend all this time in Africa to write an article about underwater cable repair. There is a lot of waiting, the author speculates a lot about the head of the mission and his partner, who the author only briefly meets. He does a lot of foreshadowing that something major will happen, so that by the time it does, we are no longer surprised, and it's a little anti-climactic.

I loved this book. I had no knowledge of the depths of the ocean, that underground cables that lie on the floor of the ocean carry our "Cloud" messages, and that if one has a break, it disrupts everything. This story is about an Irish journalist who signs on to a boat that gets sent to fix the broken cables. And the story is about so much more. It reads like a dream, sentences that weave into sentences that are haunting. The journalist becomes captivated with the Chief of the boat, Conway, and his partner Jamele. He is haunted by their stories which he is trying to unravel until the very end of the novel and even then....
Fennel, the journalist, is a different person by the end of the book. That's all I say.
If you find it hard reading in the beginning, hang in there. It will soon grab you up and transport you into a dreamworld.

I was originally drawn to this novel based on its setting. Few books explore human interaction with the bottom of the ocean, and I was really intrigued to see how this would play out from a technical point of view. Twist is well crafted and easy to read. I feel like I learned a lot about communication cables -- with the caveat that this work of fiction, and I cannot garner how detailed or accurate the author’s research was.

There were several areas where the plot arc was artful, but could have been a bit tighter. For example, I did not find Conoway half as mysterious or intriguing as our narrator, and I think there could have been more action on the ship, helping build suspense for the later twist. Similarly, I found Zanele’s role odd and out of place. Her dialogue is rather unhelpful, and in my opinion, it doesn’t add to Conway’s character development. All in all, I feel lukewarm about the novel.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review!

The cables that provide our internet connectivity lie deep under Earth's oceans. Sometimes, due to weather or other interference, a cable breaks and a repair ships are sent out to fix the broken cable. Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist, is assigned to research the process and become a passenger on a repair boat. He meets fellow Irishman John Conway. Conway is the mission chief of a repair ship headed to a repair assignment. The story of the ship's travel and the repair is beyond anything I could have imagined. It involves dangerous work and incredible skills of the repair team, tasked to maintain the world's information highway. The story interconnects with the story of John Conway., dealing with his own brokenness and inability to repair his own human connections. Something I think we can all understand. Thanks to Netgalley and publishers for the opportunity to read Twist in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance reader's copy of this book. Unfortunately at this time I will be unable to give it my full attention, so I will provide a starred rating and return when I can give it a proper review.

I gave this a go, and I could just not get into it or connect with the characters. The synopsis sounded right up my alley but just did not hit like I wanted it too. Thank you so much to the publisher and author for the opportunity to try,
2.5

Journalist Anthony Fennell joins the crew of a cable repair vessel sailing along the west coast of Africa to document the process of locating and repairing severed fiber-optic cables. The reader shares Fennell’s personal experiences at sea that read like a journal: his days of seasickness, his impression of the ship and crew, and his musings about life in general. But things get serious when it becomes apparent there is sabotage involved in the cable breaks, and Fennell has a front row seat as the drama unfolds. As the plot thickens, it “Twists” as well. Enjoy.

Gosh, golly! Loved this book! Review as soon as I can!⏰️

"Twist" is Colum McCann's latest novel, and it is a most unexpected jewel of a novel!

With an unexpected theme, populated with unexpected, imperfect, intelligent characters, I was unprepared for the deeply serious themes of mankind's responsibility for the stewardship of our natural resources, our connection to those resources, and to the technology that drives our ever expanding quest to explore and understand the seductive mysteries and miracles of both. McCann, through his characters, this complicated story, and the exquisite prose that brings his characters and their stories to life, we are led with care down the slippery slope of both stewardship and exploitation.

Colum McCann is an author worth reading, but more importantly, for this reader, he is a writer whose work spurs contemplation, reflection, and a renewed responsibility of shared humanity and the concept of *tikkun olam* that McCann deftly weaves into every corner of this amazing story.

*Tikkun olam* is a Hebrew phrase that means "repair the world." Rabbinic scholarship teaches that all of us have an inherent responsibility to heal, repair, and transform the world until we have brought it back to its natural, harmonious state. In those efforts, we may be gifted with both the blessing and the responsibility of our world's care. That, my dear readers, is not something to be taken lightly.

I am grateful for the author's craft, his efforts at both entertaining and educating that can be found in "Twist," and to the publisher and NetGalley for offering me the opportunity to read this wonderful novel.

#Twist
#ColumMcCann
#NetGalley

I finished this book a couple of months ago and I can't stop thinking about it. McCann (an auto-read author for me) creates a story about connection of all kinds. Did you know the world's information is transmitted by cords that run along the bottom of the ocean?! (I didn't, either!) As you can imagine, sometimes they break and need to be repaired. The setting of the book is a reporter joining a boat filled with a team that goes to the area it's broken to repair it. McCann combines this setting and story line to propel a personal story of connection, uniting, and introspection. Highly recommended!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. This is a difficult book to review, and hard to classify. There were parts I liked, but most of it didn’t gel for me. Colum is a good writer, and I found his writing style to be easy to read. I didn’t find the ending to be satisfying since there wasn’t closure with Conway. I feel like there was a lot of attempted build up to a big reveal at the end, but it just kind of fizzled out. I wasn’t emotionally invested in any of the characters, nor did I find them particularly interesting or likable. The best part for me was learning about the cables under the sea- I ended up doing research online about them which was neat. Learning about new things is one of the great things about reading.

Colum McCann, renowned for “Let the Great World Spin” and “Apeirogon,” has built a career on expansive, poetic storytelling that delves into the depths of human resilience. With his latest, “Twist” (Random House, $28), he once again reaffirms his place as one of today’s most compelling literary voices.

A novel that resists easy classification, “Twist” navigates between literary fiction, adventure and philosophical inquiry. At its core, it follows Anthony Fennell, a disillusioned Irish writer whose career and life feel adrift. What starts as a routine assignment profiling a deep-sea cable repair crew quickly spirals into something far deeper — literally and figuratively. Fennell dives headfirst into the hidden world of underwater infrastructure, where the fragile cables keeping humanity connected mirror the tangled, fraying threads of his own life. As the journey unfolds, fixing what’s broken becomes more than just a job — it’s a reckoning with loss, connection and the messy business of trying to hold it all together.

McCann’s prose is, as always, luminous and precise. His ability to blend the tactile and the poetic makes “Twist” an immersive experience, whether he’s detailing the mechanics of underwater repair or the existential weight Fennell carries. Though the mystery at its heart doesn’t unravel in a traditional way, its deeper questions linger: Can broken things truly be mended? Can disconnection ever be undone? McCann doesn’t provide easy answers, but his novel ensures we keep searching.

“𝘉𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘴, 𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵, 𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘺.”

I read McCann’s Apeirogon a handful of years ago and was blown away. While that one has a very unique structure and flow with especially heavy and intense subject matter, I deeply appreciated the story and the brutal honesty regarding its topics and themes. When I heard of a new book by him I immediately requested on NetGalley (thank you also to Random House for the advanced readers copy ) and it became an anticipated release of 2025! It’s available now! The format to Twist is unlike Apeirogon, so in a way it felt like reading a different author, and it is significantly shorter too.

Would you think a character driven story about an Irish journalist recalling the events preceding - following an underwater fiber optics and cable repair boat crew featuring a mysterious freediver as a captain of the mission off the coast of Africa to be intriguing? Oh but it is! Definitely literary, so if you are someone who highly prefers plot driven stories then you may struggle with this one. While the repair is the supposed focal point, there are so many strong underlying themes of identity, deceit, connection, tragedy, hope, and truth. It makes you ponder and reflect, especially the further in you get and the layers are peeled back. There is an air of mystery and intrigue mixed with the vulnerability in which it addresses our humanity and the way we present ourselves, the way we connect (and disconnect) from others.

If you haven’t read this or if it hasn’t been put on your radar yet, I highly recommend!



Other noteworthy quotes:
“𝘈𝘵 𝘢 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦.”

“𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥,” 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥, “𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦.”

“𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘦, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴.“

“𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯, 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘵𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴.”

“𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘴, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧-𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘪𝘵.”

Do you ever think about how we can communicate electronically - what’s really involved? I don’t usually - but this book certainly has me thinking about it more. About the very thin cables along the bottom of the ocean that are critical to our communication. And a world I knew nothing about - the ships and crews who go out to repair when one of those cables breaks.

I enjoyed learning about this new world but there were parts of the story that didn’t work for me. A lot of foreshadowing that didn’t quite pay off in ways that felt fully formed. Sometimes the story got a little bogged down in the writing. I am still glad I read it but don’t think this is one I would reread. Thank you to the publisher for the gifted book.

I picked this up because the idea of building an exciting plot around undersea internet cables appealed, and the execution is pretty good too.

The first-person narrator is an Irish journalist hoping to write an interesting story for a magazine by joining the crew of a South-African internet cable repair ship. Upon arrival in Cape Town, the journalist becomes obsessed by the elusive and phlegmatic mission chief Conway and his gorgeous partner Zanele. Then heavy rainfall in the Congo damages a cable off its coast leaving much of South-West Africa without internet and the ship sets off to find the break.

As the novel starts going back and forth in time, it becomes clear something has gone wrong on the mission.

I had slight problems with the novel, in particular the journalist's obsession, which pretty much drives the plot - it was not entirely clear why Conway and Zanele are so instantly mindblowing.

I also think more could have been done from a literary perspective with the fascinating premise. There are parallels with Apocalypse Now, Great Gatsby, and I am sure I have missed more.

It also felt as though McCann had been aboard a ship for his research but not on an actual mission...

Despite all this, it's still a well-paced story on an interesting subject, so 3.5 rounded up.

This is really beautiful writing and I think this book would make a great read for a book club. There were definitely aspects I would’ve loved to discuss with others. The writing is deep, and by that I mean that it went a bit over my head at times. I think I missed nuggets that the author left for the reader to discover. But, even so, I really liked this. I thought that the technical aspects of the underwater cables and their repair absolutely fascinating. And the characters were written with such depth and care.
The author gives us just enough to keep the reader interested but also leaves us wanting more.

I absolutely recommend this book!