Based upon a true life event, Small Boat, tells the story of an inflatible boat carrying migrants in the English Channel, somewhere between England and France, which takes on water and sinks killing 27 souls. We read about the many calls asking for help that were received and ignored by a French call center employee and her total abdication of any moral responsibility for the lack of action resulting in the deaths. Why is the sea not to blame? Why are the migrants not to blame for embarking upon this journey ?

It was no surprise to me that the author is a noteworthy French philosopher, as he delves into the self justification of inhumane thoughts and actions. When the employee is called to explain her behavior, she accepts no responsibility. Are there no consequences for one who has no moral compass? Delecroix has done of masterful job of describing a scenario that has implications in today’s world and for much of human history. Five stars for a short book with an important message. It is being published today. I highly recommend it readers who enjoy thinking while reading. My thanks to NetGalley and Hope Road Publishing for an ARC in exchange for my review.

I couldn’t get into this. Preachy, miserable tone. I think maybe just the wrong book wrong person wrong time situation, but there’s something about a book like this I am so tired of reading.

Small Boat is the most powerful book I’ve read this year. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I highly recommend you do so! I would be thrilled to see Small Boat win this year’s International Booker Prize.

This novel is based on true events. In November 2021, more migrants attempted to cross the Channel from France to the UK than in any other month. While many were rescued, unfortunately, not all of them survived.

When boats begin to sink, people on board call the operators at CROSS in Cap Gris-Nez, France, for help. This fictionalized story revolves around one such boat in November 2021, which urgently called for assistance. A desperate migrant who was already in the water made a call and was informed, “Yes, but you’re in English waters.”

This tragedy resulted in the deaths of 27 migrants and raised serious questions about accountability. Following the incident, a French investigation scrutinized the operators for their suspected “failure to assist persons in danger.”

Vincent Delecroix skillfully combines details from public records with his creativity. Our narrator is the radio operator who failed to save the boat full of people.

This small yet profound book is divided into three parts. The first part features our narrator being questioned by a policewoman, revealing her lack of empathy. The second part recounts the tragic events from the migrants’ perspective as their boat sinks, and they wait, hoping for help to arrive. The third part focuses on the narrator reflecting on her life and situation after the interview concludes.

The book raises important questions about the migrant crisis, morality, humanity, conscience, guilt, and blame.

I absolutely loved this book! It is an important and impactful novel that will linger in readers’ minds long after they finish it. Delecroix highlights crucial questions about how many of us are complicit in the suffering of migrants. Where do guilt and blame truly lie?

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix is a poignant and thought-provoking novel that delves into the moral complexities surrounding a real-life tragedy. In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the English Channel, resulting in the deaths of 27 individuals. Despite receiving numerous distress calls, French authorities failed to provide timely assistance, leading to widespread outrage.

Delecroix's fictionalized account centers on the French coastguard radio operator who received these calls but did not act to prevent the disaster. The narrative is structured in three parts: the operator's interrogation by police, a harrowing depiction of the sinking from the migrants' perspective, and a return to the operator's life post-tragedy. This structure effectively explores themes of guilt, responsibility, and the human tendency to compartmentalize moral failings.​

This is a novel with philosophical depth and emotional resonance. How far back does complicity go? The book holds a mirror up to ourselves, it’s a reflection on the bystander effect and the moral disengagement that often accompanies systemic failures.​

Small Boats falls into the “slim but mighty” category. It’s a powerful and timely work that challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about complicity and the human cost of indifference.

I really wanted to read this book but when I my request was accepted it had no archive date. It was only when I went looking for it today to download that I realised it had been suddenly archived. It would be useful if we could be notified when an archive date has been changed. Thank you

Morally illuminating and a book for the times. This title was heartbreaking as it detailed the sinking of the vessel, in full. Painful, brilliantly written.

Wow, this book! ❤️‍🔥 Slim in size but certainly not in scope, the narrative steadily unspools itself into something vast and infinite, encompassing the nature of our big little lives and the existential truths of our humanity. I found it necessary to slow down, absorbing all it had to say, then immediately wanting to start over at the beginning once I’d reached the end. It sunk itself into me, and I’m still thinking about it all these days later, a mark of a good book imo!

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boats was first published in French as Naufrage in 2023, and impeccably translated into English by Helen Stevenson. As outlined in the introduction by Jeremy Harding, it is based on true events that took place on the night of November 23/24 in 2021, a boatload of refugees sinking to their deaths attempting to cross the waters from France to the UK, key officers from the French regional monitoring and rescue centre (aka CROSS) later interviewed to ascertain what might have led to the tragedy, records of their actions, what was said and unsaid in that time available for public consumption.
With plenty of handwringing across both sides of the channel, this tragedy becomes a site of spectacle, judgment and condemnations aplenty, a collective hunt for absolution all the more agonizing in the face of its apparent lack. After all:
▫️”There is no shipwreck without spectators”

It’s an incredibly powerful book that examines language, complicity, justice and morality, empathy and evil. Like crossing a hurricane, the narrative is told in three parts. First, the tense aftermath of tragedy when a CROSS officer is interrogated by someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to herself, all the more shocking for its dispassionate coolness. Next, the relative calm that accompanies the recounting of said tragedy, tension defused somewhat in knowing what has taken place yet unnerving still to witness, the eye of the storm. At last, the ferocity amps up, the weight of reckoning urgently colliding with a sense of cosmic inevitability, one that we are all caught up in, the threat of humanity devouring itself whole.

Plumbing the depths of our psyches and the philosophies we live by, the novel’s stylistic choices provide both a window and a mirror into human nature. The choice of narrator, storyline, and shifts in writing style all serve a purpose to illustrate not just the bureaucratic banality of evil, characterised by a lack of imagination and self-reflection, but how scapegoating a singular individual distracts from true reckoning with the systemic nature of evil, as well as our own complicity and responsibilities towards one another. Such a trial is reduced to a symbolic act, designed to promote (subjective) moral narratives and avoids true accountability.

I especially appreciated its examination of language and narrative, how they shape and reflect our interior lives, identities, and moralities. How they inform how we see ourselves and each other. It calls into question our relative agency, what we owe one another, who has the right to tell a story, who is ‘humanised’, and, ultimately, how we are all more than just stories. Adrift in the sea of life, we cling to words like a life raft, a means of connection, protest, and severance, but metaphors ring hollow and words cease to have meaning in the face of indescribable truths: that They drown so We can breathe, that we breathe because they have drowned.

Can’t recommend this enough! Encompassing the earthly and existential, it’s at once a compelling tale and furious indictment, expressing profound shame and sorrow, love and compassion for humanity in a deeply unjust world. It demonstrates the banality of both evil and empathy, compelling us to go beyond ourselves and really look at the systems we are unthinkingly caught up in. As reflected in its poetics, words alone do not absolve us. Literature alone isn’t revolutionary. Wringing our hands in outrage as readers and spectators of suffering still translates to inaction.
No one survives alone. It is what we do when the book is closed, how we choose to act in service of one another in the knowledge of all we have witnessed that might bring about true catharsis, perhaps even justice. We are neither gods nor monsters, but humans altogether capable of creating the change we wish to see in the world, so that all of us may breathe.

Thank you so much @hoperoadpublishing for my copy of this book, loved every page!

Wow what a book! This book is based on the true events of 27 migrants crossing the Channel from France to UK who tragically died in 2021 over the course of 3 hours because of inactions/miscommunications on both sides.

What I loved most about this book is its moral clarity told through the stream of consciousness style of a woman (the French coast guard who took the distress calls from the sinking migrants but didn’t do much to help them) being investigated for negligence.

The author does a phenomenal job in holding up a mirror showing that while the readers might be disgusted by the woman’s ideas and actions, what we are ultimately disgusted with is our own inactions. But through this “unlikable” narrator (the book is so much deeper than using this term, but for the sake of easier communication, please bear with me), I was reminded of humanity’s moral apathy and perhaps most importantly, my own moral apathy disguised as moral superiority. It gave me so much to think about and made me utterly depressed by the disconnection between our collective complicity in all the deaths and destructions around the world.

SMALL BOAT is not an easy read. The stream of consciousness writing style coupled with circular philosophical arguments will demand your attention. And most of all, it asks the question: do you actually want to save the migrants (or anyone)? Or do you just want to feel good about yourself?

Review: Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix – A Haunting Portrait of Bureaucratic Indifference

Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Small Boat is Vincent Delecroix’s first novel to appear in English, deftly translated by Helen Stevenson. Originally published in French as Naufrage, the novella offers a piercing philosophical inquiry into one of the most harrowing migration tragedies in recent memory: the 2021 sinking of a migrant boat in the English Channel.

Told through the voice of an unnamed French coastguard officer, the novel charts a series of distress calls made by a dinghy carrying twenty-nine migrants, fourteen in total, which go unheeded. The protagonist—detached, cynical, and almost wilfully indifferent—serves not just as a character but as a conduit for wider critique: of institutional failure, jurisdictional ambiguity, and the emotional austerity required to navigate state bureaucracy. Her voice is unnerving in its dispassion: “I had no more opinion on the migrants than I did on migration policy… I was not required to have an opinion.”

Delecroix, himself a philosopher, skilfully probes the moral cost of such detachment, exposing the quiet complicity that allows injustice to flourish. The novel’s closing section, narrated by a survivor, shifts the emotional register—personalising the scale of loss and underscoring the human cost of systemic inertia.

A taut, lyrical meditation on empathy, responsibility, and the politics of indifference, Small Boat is as much a philosophical provocation as it is a literary achievement. It demands that we ask not just what happened, but why—and at what cost. Essential reading.

“but I did ask what would have happened if I had assessed the situation correctly. Dead just the same, by the time the rescuers got there, as happened half the time. Unless it was dead perhaps, in which case between dead perhaps and dead for sure there was an irreducible gap that from now on would always stand between me and innocence.“⁣
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From: 𝘚𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘉𝘰𝘢𝘵 by Vincent Delecroix, tr by Helen Stevenson and Jeremy Harding⁣
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International @thebookerprizes longlist #5⁣
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Thank you @peepaltreepress for the gifted copy!⁣
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Oof. This was devastating. A skilled portrayal of western negligence and careless disregard of the refugee crisis. Unfortunately, you could swap out refugee crisis for too many other glaring world issues and it will still be true, but the fact that it was used here with one specific, very real incident, made it all the more powerful to me. ⁣
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Yes, going in, I felt a certain level of unease about the fact that a white man was writing about this horrible tragedy from the perspective of the white radio operator that willfully did not send a rescue ship to a dinghy with 29 migrants in the middle of the Channel, even though their dire situation was painfully obvious from their phone calls, and this led to the death of 27 of them. I was afraid it would be another story not giving voice to the victims. ⁣
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In the end though, it seemed a deliberate choice to write it like this to emphasize society’s role in these tragedies and I must admit that it was that uncomfortable feeling of being inside the head of that radio operator making her sickening arguments, alongside the actual human calamity, that hammered its message down and it even started to feel more appropriate coming from this white author than when he would have written from the victims’ point of view. ⁣

I read that the author is a philosopher and that does make sense: here he explores collective guilt versus individual blame. Although sometimes the radio operator’s reasoning felt a little too “sophisticated” or philosophical - for lack of a better word - for this specific character, it was all helping to make the point. In the end I think the detachment of the victims’ inner lives is a portrayal of how the radio operator got to her reasoning. The dehumanization and generalizations of the lives of refugees by the media and politicians on a daily basis, is part of what makes it so easy for so many people to just look away.⁣
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All in all, I thought this was a very thought-provoking read and it is one that I keep wanting to talk about with people. I think this is an important read and I am very happy it gets more widely read due to it being longlisted.⁣
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This book was not on my radar before it was longlisted for the International Booker prize but I am so glad that the prize added it to my reading for this year. Small Boat was a short but impactful look at immigration in Europe.

The introduction to Small Boat explains how the story is based on a real incident that happened in the English Channel in 2021, during which 27 people died. Delecroix takes on the voice of a female Coast Guard in France, the one who was in contact with the fictionalized boat during the evening of the disaster.

In the first part of the book, the Coast Guard grapples with her role in the incident as a police officer interviews her about her responsibility. She does not feel that she is at fault, being desensitized to the disaster; she gets distress calls every shift from similar boats. Delecroix, a philosopher, uses her perspective to unpack the idea of guilt. Who is truly at fault when a boat of asylum seekers sinks off the coast? Is it the government or its citizens who should take responsibility for them? Delecroix does well at riding the line between exploring this question without being moralizing, even in the last part of the book, where the tone shifts.

The middle interlude puts us on the small boat, from when the asylum seekers leave the shore to their untimely demise in the middle of the channel. While the rest of the story is told in the first-person stream of consciousness, this middle section takes a more distant view while still empathizing with the plight of these people.

I think the choice to title this “Small Boat” rather than “Shipwreck,” which gets closer to the French “Naufrage,” was an interesting translation choice. The French title gives us more of a dual meaning that can apply to the way the Coast Guard officer feels, overwhelmed by the ‘migrant crisis,’ as well as the event itself.

Overall, I really loved the reading experience of this book. Delecroix is a skilled writer and Helen Stevenson a skilled translator.

I didn't expect this novella to be so brilliant?

The story revolves around a woman who was on duty the day a boat carrying migrants sank. It's not clear if she was really guilty of what happened, but she was being judged and for a reason.

There's so much philosophy in this book. The woman was constantly torn between completely denying her guilt and trying to justify her actions. Maybe she was not guilty at all? She listened impassively to the cries for help, perhaps did not answer immediately, and didn't actually care what would happen next.

This book explores the lack of empathy in people.

This woman is a typical person you can meet any other day on the street. She excuses herself, saying that boats with migrants arrive every day, and they all call for help. She didn't force them to make this dangerous journey. It was their choice, so how is she to blame? She adds that there are already too many refugees in the country and insists it is not her fault that there is war, famine, and other global issues. She says she was in a bad mood and was annoyed that she was being called when there was nothing she could do. But suddenly, it's not about what she did or didn't do, but what she said.

Of course, none of these events actually took place, but recordings of conversations between the migrants and the guards in 2021 became public. It was complete indifference, coldness, and even sarcasm that prompted the author to write a book about inhumanity, ethics in crisis situations, and the banality of evil. The same people who act so unempathetically toward migrants could be our friends, acquaintances, and relatives. They are everywhere, and it breaks my heart.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for a free arc in exchange for an honest review.

Small Boat is best experienced in one sitting. You are in a woman’s mind, she did something that had terrible consequences, and you are asked to judge her. But how will you judge her? Especially because judging her requires, to a degree, that you judge yourself. This book made me feel sad—sad for her, sad for those impacted by her inaction, and also sad for humanity, especially for the ways privilege shields us from others’ vulnerabilities, particularly when those others exist at a distance. This book is chilling in its depiction of life and death, it will make you feel ice cold like the sea in winter, and it will make you question the (in)significance of borders, what they dictate and what they dupe us into believing, for we are conditioned, and that becomes part of the point.

This was the most frustrating, anger inducing, morally ambiguous book I’ve read in ages. And I loved it.

Our narrator is the most unreliable I’ve ever encountered. She truly doesn’t understand what she’s done wrong- how could it be her fault that a boat of immigrants drowned on her Coast Guard watch?

After all, she didn’t ask them to leave.

As she tries to explain how she’s not a bad person, because her ex is an anti-immigrant racist, and she broke it off with him, along with a whole passel of excuses, her circular logic begins to become something of a mirror for the privileged world.

The author brings in philosophy, religion (often interchangeable here) and ethics. In the process, he creates a character who may be the most morally warped ever: ourselves.

GM Gilbert said that evil is a lack of empathy. The narrator of Small Boat represents those who have lost their empathy, their compassion, and their commitment towards their fellow humans.

This book represents the best kind of literature: it holds up a mirror, and makes the reader want to change for the better. I will think about this book for a long time, and revisit it when I need to remember who I should strive to be.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hope Road for the ARC.

A powerful and haunting little book. It expertly forces the reader into a position to consider the ethical and mortal ambiguities of the main character, and by extension, their own complicity.

An affecting novella giving a fictionalised account of real live events when one night in 2021 a boat carrying asylum seekers capsized in the English channel, with around 30 people losing their lives. We see a lot of this through the eyes of a coastguard on duty that night, and her retelling of events to authorities.
She is almost numb to what is happening as she tells the desperate people calling for help to calm down, believing she is acting with professionalism. And it's frustrating, but intentionally so. It shows just how numb it is possible to become to awful things happening to real people, and how bureaucracy can be utterly hampering.
There are also parts of this book where we focus on that night from an asylum seeker's point of view and it is utterly harrowing.
I won't say that every part of this book worked for me, but it was powerful and feels very much like required reading.

The author does a good job of luring in the reader with some quite potent arguments laid out by the narrator, so that we sympathise with some of her opinions, while also being repulsed by others. Clearly, there is a fine line between humanity and hypocrisy, or honesty and lack of empathy.
The second part is an account of the actual sinking and the despair of the passengers who realise they are about to die – this is written in far more dramatic, poetic prose, and was the most moving part of the book for me.

The first and third parts were wonderfully Houellebecqian in their relentless dedication to showing us the banality of evil. I could have done without the middle part, though. I wanted to stay longer with the main character, not to try to understand the situation (as if that would be possible), but just to stay a little longer, though I wonder if I needed more than I got, considering that these people are as ubiquitous in everyday life as air.

Small Boat tells the real-life tragedy of an inflatible dinghy carrying migrants which capsized on its voyage from France to the UK, sadly resulting in the death of 27 people, including one child.

Vincent Delecroix expertly tells this story from the point of view of the French Navy officer who answers the dinghy's distress call and then from the fictionalised view of those on board in their final terrifying moments. In the days following the disaster, the world wants to hold the officer accountable for her actions, or lack thereof. The officer refuses to be held solely accountable for these deaths. It was her who answered the numerous distress calls, her who eventually admitted to the migrant on the other end of the line that help would not be coming, but is she only to blame?

Small Boat asks deeply philosophical questions of the reader namely, who is at fault? Is the officer more responsible for these deaths than the wars that force the migrants to flee their homes? Is she more responsible than the policies in place, than the resources available to the French and UK governments to send help? Mostly, is she more responsible for these deaths than the powerful, unpredictable ocean that swallowed them up?

A fascinating read that really makes the reader consider their own responsibility in regards to social issues and one that I certainly will not forget. Small Boat is truly thought provoking and important in our current climate.

Thank you to NetGalley and HopeRoad for the opportunity to read this arc. I am not surprised at all that this translation has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize and goodluck to the author.

<i><blockquote>So with all this going on, this ongoing shipwreck, why bother? I asked... And the one you save will perish tomorrow or the day after, here or elsewhere. So why bother?</i></blockquote>

This is a short and important read but one which I expected to be more sophisticated than it is. Based on a real-life tragedy of asylum-seekers drowning in the English Channel when their boat capsizes, this features the woman on the French side who took the emergency calls, who didn't summon up a French rescue boat that was just twenty kilometers away, who tried to pass it off to the British coastguard who did send a rescue ship but couldn't find this capsized dinghy without more information, and who, when another French ship saw bodies floating in the water and called her for instructions, told that ship to ignore the emergency and pass on by. She then took calls from the increasingly desperate people who were drowning for three hours and just got increasingly annoyed with them for bothering her. Twenty seven men, women, and children drowned that night, and just two survived. But the narrator doesn't feel any sense of responsibility.

Structurally, this is a triptych with the first and third parts from this French narrator: the first is her interview with an appalled police officer; the third her post-event meditations; the centre is an 'objective' description of the drowning of these people abandoned at night in the Channel, watching their families and loved ones die.

I guess from the reviews I expected this to raise more problematic questions but actually what this reminded me of most, right from the start, was those testimonies of 'normal' people who worked in the Nazi concentration camps who claimed they were just following instructions and therefore were not culpable in genocide.

For all her claimed unemotional testimony, the narrator lets slip that she is not neutral on the crossings or the fate of asylum seekers: 'I didn't ask you to leave [your homes]', 'every day I have the dregs of the earth spilling out before my eyes', she calls them 'parasites', her ex says 'once you've fished them out, why don't you send them straight to Africa' despite refugees being Kurds, Iraqis, Afghanis and others, and she reconstructs the narrative to one of 'these people... and their obsession with flinging themselves into the water in search of I know not what'. And, at the heart of the issue for me, is the fact that this woman is employed by French naval services to 'monitor maritime traffic and co-ordinate rescue', something which she simply fails to do.

The third section does raise some of the issues that I expected about the systematic and structural issues that have lead to this crisis, not least the closure of legal asylum routes, but this book isn't really operating in that space, I think. Yes, of course, this tragedy and all the other similar cases are not solely the fault of a single person but, in this book, the cynical refusal to even bother trying to summon nearby patrol boats and the actual turning away of a boat that would have stopped to rescue people are unambiguously culpable actions from someone paid to do the opposite. It's that closing down of the questions of social and political complicity and guilt, replacing it with the shocking inhumanity of someone who took desperate calls from drowning people for three hours and was just irritated by them rather than concerned which ended up making this feel straightforward and rather one-note to me.

An important book, nonetheless, given the absolutely contemporary nature of tragedies like this.