I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

This week, I'm joined by Collin McCann, the National Book Award-winning author of more than a dozen books.

His latest, Twist, is about an Irish writer who, a little at loose ends, takes on a

magazine assignment to write about a cable repair boat, that is, the large ship and its crew,

this one based in South Africa, which heads out into the ocean whenever a repair is needed on one of the undersea

cables that transmits most of the world's information between nations and continents.

This writer finds himself in an uneasy relationship with the head of the boat's crew,

a man named Conway, who has quite a mysterious past.

Column, it's a pleasure to have you.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

When one hears underwater cables that carry much of the world's information,

it can't help inspire, I think, all sorts of scenarios

for me, primarily like espionage based, to be honest. With this book, with Twist, which came first?

The cables or the characters? Cables came first. And if you think of turning our world upside down,

and with Mount Everest down there and with all these cliffs and all these crags and all these canyons,

these tubes which carry 95% of the world's information, they snake along the bottom of the floor.

But we tend to think that it's a level seafloor.

It's not.

And sometimes I'm amazed by the fact that they carry so much

of their information. There's only about 450 of them, but sometimes they snap way down there

in the deep darkness. And what happens when they snap? You got to repair them. Because you can't put

out, to put out a new cable would probably cost about $4 billion. These cables are

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