Small Boat

Description

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix's fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?

A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

Awards

​Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

Reviews

"As icy as the waters of the Channel on a November night." La Voix du Nord

 

"The narrator accuses those who judge her of hypocrisy and will only see herself as a cog in the administrative wheel of a France that will not give refuge to the world's misery. As strong and cruel as the times we live in."

Paris Match

 

"The metaphor of drowning reminds us of the extreme indifference which allows all of us to keep our head above water whilst others drown. The drowning in question is not that of twenty-seven lives but of humanity itself."

Page des libraires

 

"In Delecroix's gripping novel, based on a real incident in the Channel in 2021, a troubled coastguard examines her conscience. Was she really complicit in the deaths of 27 migrants at sea during her watch? Perhaps she's a 'monster', yet she's unwilling to shoulder all the blame. If the drowned are lost, then so are the millions of citizens who deplore the round of migrant deaths they see in the news: 'There is no shipwreck without spectators . . . but not one person looks like getting up to step into the water.' As she struggles to distinguish personal and collective responsibility, she becomes convinced that when the sea claims a migrant boat, it claims us all."

Jeremy Harding

 

"A gripping story of an everyday monster that shines its light back on us and on our refusals to face what is happening in our world."

-Gillian Slovo

 

 

Prizes: Long-listed for Prix Goncourt (France) and The International Booker Prize 2025 (UK).

Author Biography:

Vincent Delecroix (born 1969 in Paris) is a French philosopher and writer. A graduate from the Ecole normale superieure, and agrege of philosophy, he teaches at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Vincent Delecroix received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for his novel Ce qui est perdu (published in 2006) and the Grand prix de litterature de l'Academie francaise after he published Tombeau d'Achille (in 2008). Small Boat was on the long-list of the 2023 Prix Goncourt. This is the first translation of a novel by Vincent Delecroix in English.