Dear Great Book Guru, Last week my family and I gathered for our annual Spring celebration here in Sea Cliff, and everyone was talking about a new book by a favorite Irish author. It’s about the sea and sounded a bit like The Heart of Darkness. Have you read it? Smitten by the Sea

 Dear Smitten by the Sea, Colum McCann’s TWIST, his newest book, is indeed about the sea but so much more. As many of McCann’s books do, this latest is a story of connections: the enormous undersea cables that connect us to the cyberworld and each other. The book’s narrator is Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist whose latest assignment is to write about the hidden world of undersea cables that carry all the world’s data and what happens when these cables break.  He waits for notice of a break and, when it happens, finds himself aboard a ship bound for West Africa and commandeered by John Conway, an inscrutable genius with a mysterious history.  Many of the crew also have back stories that connect with the underground sea world – a world more unfathomable than outer space.  Throughout, Fennell refers back to Zanele, the beautiful partner of Conway, and the twists that link her to the mission.  The realization that so much of human connection relies on fragile cables miles below the earth at the bottom of the sea is both startling and horrifying.  A beautifully written book with echoes of The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, The Odyssey and - yes of course - The Heart of Darkness… highly recommended!