So how lost are we without our devices? Or putting it more simply as novelist Column McCann might, just how isolated are we?

His new novel asks big questions through a story of characters literally at sea.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has this profile of the book and its writer for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

In the murky depths of the sea, an unknown world of life.

But also down there, the wires that carry much of the information that enriches, ruins,

control so much of our lives.

And that astounded novelist Colin McCann.

I stumbled upon a story about a boat that goes out to fix the internet. I was like, what

the world does that mean? How can a boat, you know, fix the, fix the internet? Because I thought

everything was up and yeah. Satellites and, yeah. Satellites, clouds. My emails went up into some sort of heavenly atmosphere and rained down their darkness

on the world.

But no, no, no, like 95% of the world's intercontinental information travels at the bottom of the

sea.

From that fact came a novel, twist, part adventure and love story, part meditation on broken lives,

and the impossibility of fixing them.

Here's how it begins.

We are all shards in the smash-up.

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.

So this is a novel about repair and what cannot be repaired. Yeah, it's a novel about brokenness.

It's a novel about sabotage.

It's a novel about repair.

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