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

An exhilarating adventure reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, with just a hint of Graham Greene - MAIL ON SUNDAY

Masterful, a surprising, electric book ... A wired up story of what it means to be bend yourself into new shapes, and be broken - IRISH TIMES

Genuinely haunting and sometimes thrilling ... There are also plenty of genuinely gorgeous passages about the way people are translated into dots of light in our information-based economy. As usual, McCann is sensitive to the fluid nature of oppression across history and countries - WASHINGTON POST

Told with McCann's incomparable prose, Twist opens a window into an obscure way people on earth are connected, told by a man who is himself fairly broken ... Gorgeously written and sad and inspiring - BOSTON GLOBE

Film noir meets The Great Gatsby in McCann's deep dive of a novel ... An immersive read destined to win prizes - IRISH INDEPENDENT

Every sentence feels placed with confidence - and through various authorial wiles he has produced a work at once enigmatic and urgent - NEW YORK TIMES

Dazzling ... a plot that uncoils with page-turning urgency ... McCann's prose has a power and lyrical propulsion that can be quite dazzling . an unexpected denouement that uncoils with page-turning urgency - ESQUIR