The Yale Club of Vermont Book Club’s next meeting happens on Wednesday, September 17, 2025, from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. on Zoom. The book is Twist, by Collum McCann. Registration will open soon.

Twist is a propulsive 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.

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. 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.  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. 

“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

“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