Booker Prize-longlisted Dublin-born, Irish author, resident of New York, Colum McCann’s epic novel Twist is about connection, disconnection and destruction. McCann watches seavengers on a coastal dump in Ghana collecting fragments of copper and rubber worth “a week’s worth of food” from discarded lengths of fibre-optic cable. In Twist, inspecting a damaged end of a data-carrying cable, Anthony Fennel, a journalist in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s communication across the ocean floor and what happens when they snap.

Separated from his son and sunk in hard-drinking mid-life torpor, Fennell plans to write an online feature about Irish John Conway, “ Chief of mission” on a cable-repair ship that operates out of Cape Town. 95 per cent of data traffic travels by submarine cable, often over the same pathways followed by 19^th-century telegraph links. Fennel reflects “History within History. Recent incidents of suspected sabotage in the Baltic Sea and off Taiwan, along with Meta’s plans for a 50, 000 km subsea network name “Project Waterworth”.

Those severed fibre optic cables come to represent all the torn connections of people and their fragile planet, bound together more closely than ever but nonetheless stricken by “unfathomable isolation”. Conway frets during mid-repair “Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken”. McCann combines shipboard adventure with romantic melancholy.  Conway’s glamorous South African partner Zanele, her acting career shoots towards stardom when she travels to Brighton to play Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Conway and his team try to locate the breaks, from the swollen mouth of the Congo have disrupted internet traffic across swaths of west Africa. McCann writes “ If technology was about magic, it was also about brutal reality, a trip to Hades armed with a piece of steel”.

Conway fixes three cable tears, Fennell quits the booze and writes his piece “The frayed ends start to come together”. Conway goes missing in Accra, as it turns out he and Zanele now a victim of online celebrity in the “exponential age” have split.

Conway, “Fire marshal of the sea, has become its prime arsonist. Fennell cannot write “a portrayal of the heroics of our unsung rescuers”. McCann writes “wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor that carry the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths”.

Twist by Colum McCann, Bloomsbury £18.99/ Random House $28, 256 pages.