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 21st century malaise – the great loneliness of the connected world

KEVIN BARRY

Transforming real-world observation into powerful storytelling is McCann's superpower

FINANCIAL TIMES, Best summer books of 2025: Fiction

McCann can find beauty, even mystery, on the front lines of danger and conflict – much like Michael Ondaatje, whose prose his own recalls ... McCann's close-focus descriptive prose – taut, compressed, image-rich – flashes like sunken treasure … Few novelists pay such close, visionary, heed to the “true stories of our times”

FINANCIAL TIMES

McCann gives his tale the sense of a held breath … Part thriller, part existential mediation on self, Twist is a strange and satisfying book that reaches for the depths

NEW STATESMAN

Simply stunning … Part thriller and part exploration of narrative and truth. (There are deliberate echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) … The 21st-century human seems a very broken thing in Twist. And McCann's novel, penned by a brilliant storyteller at the height of his powers, has a disconcerting ability to help you simultaneously find and lose your bearings

independent.co.uk

Full of wonder at the scale and beauty of the natural world – and full of anger at humanity's capacity to wreck it … There are passages of extraordinary vividness, evoked with a power that seems to persuade you that you're either a participant or a witness ... Builds to a bravura climactic escapade ... I loved the thoughtful, essayistic inquiries into nature and the environment, and the consciousness-raising voyage towards the broken cable … Like Heart of Darkness, Twist lingers after you've put it down

GUARDIAN