Small Boat

by Vincent Delecroix, Helen Stevenson (Translator)

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.

"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 '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

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, France, French Literature, Translated Fiction, Novella

110 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 17, 2023

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 12/13 of the longlist

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 -Book 6/6

Translated from French in English by Helen Stevenson and Jeremy Harding

I am posting my review just in time before the winner is announced Tomorrow. I had to read 5 other shortlistees to finally find my winner in this short novel.

The novel is based on a true event from November 2021, when a refugee dinghy capsized and caused the death of 27 people on board. Only 2 survived. There were errors made from the French side who considered the boat to be into British waters and decided to let them deal with the problem.

The story is told from the POV of the person who took the distress calls of the refugees from the French side. She is accused to failing her duty by negligence or maybe even intent. The author uses stream of consciousness to tell the tale and most of the novel takes place during an interview between this woman and a female police officer. We get to spend some time inside her head and it is not a pleasant place to be. She refuses to consider herself in any way responsible by what happened.
The novel starts like this: “I didn’t ask you to leave, I said. It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job. And apparently these thoughts were so strong that I actually spoke them out loud, the first bit, at least, certainly if the recordings are to be believed and there’s no reason not to believe them. I accept that.” The whirlwind of thoughts continue in the same style. Here is some more “I understood perfectly, your feet are in the water but it’s English water, not French, and yes I know they’re both equally cold, so set your sights in that direction if you still know your north from your south.”

It becomes quite easy to consider this person a monster, but the novel makes you wonder about you own morality and what would you do in the same position. “Empathy, I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering. Good for them. But the truth is you can’t do both at once.” When the interviewer tries to accuse her of lack of empathy, she argues that feelings are not wanted in her job and she had to remain calm and impassive in order to be effective. She repeats that statement over and over again. She also argues that the inquiries are trying to make other people feel good about themselves, not to actually check the facts. “I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue. Not because I’d done what you’re meant to do. They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words.”

This was excellent, intense, horrid in its themes and succeeds to make the reader extremely uncomfortable. This is what good literature should do, make us question ourselves and our thoughts on life.

[EveStar91 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t ask you to leave, I said.
It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.

Small Boat is the defensive detached perspective of a French marine rescue operator who didn't send out a patrol to rescue a small boat sinking in the English Channel with twenty-nine people. Over the course of three hours. Not to mention what seems to be deliberate miscommunications with the English marine rescue as well as a passing cargo ship.

More likely I thought that the English would just have to work something out because by this point they weren’t our migrants, they were their migrants. In fact, these people, who were neither French nor English, were nonetheless more English than French now.

As the introduction states, Vincent Delecroix’s compelling novel raises the unsettling possibility that each of us is complicit in the suffering of migrants. The introspective stream-of-consciousness novella delves into the operator's prejudices, or non-prejuduces as she would have you believe, starting from the first assessment of the situation - the current will have pushed the boat the last half mile into English waters by the time the rescue arrives, so call the English rescue - all the way up to the last desperate call from the sinking refugees where she still tells them to calm down.

But you just find that annoying: it’s annoying because they keep on and on calling you over those three hours, instead of just putting up with it. It’s annoying when they beg for help, when they repeat fourteen times over that they’re going to die and you’ve got to do something. I can quite see that must be annoying – idiots saying the same thing a thousand times over like children, as if they were misunderstanding, instead of taking a step back, calming down and sinking in silence.

A challenging novella, Small Boat looks into the mindset of some people with deeply racist and nationalist views in the current political landscape, even though they might not appear to be racist and nationalist on the surface and have rescue operator training behind them. The novella is open-ended and is a bit unclear on how much the events affected the operator given the probably close-to-reality character sketch shown here, especially with her blatant refusal to assume moral and ethical responsibility for her lies and misdirections over the course of events. However, it is a good platform for raising the question of why such views and prejudices should be tolerated and debated when it comes to immigrants on the roads, when they clearly seem inhuman applied to sinking refugees. Why should they be swept under the rug when it comes to human rights and dignity, when they are interrogated in the case of lives drowned?

Which words, what tone of voice set me beyond the pale of humanity?

🌟🌟🌟🌟
[3/4 star for the premise and the whole book; 3/4 star for the character sketch; One star for the world-building and context description; Half a star for the story and conclusion; One star for the writing - Four stars in total.]

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Partie de la première sélection du prix Goncourt 2023 - in the original
Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize - in English translation

Small Boat is also the entry by HopeRoad to the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize.

And a book I would have loved to see win the International Booker - exceptional - a novel which opens:

I didn’t ask you to leave, I said.

It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.

And apparently these thoughts were so strong that I actually spoke them out loud, the first bit, at least, certainly if the recordings are to be believed and there’s no reason not to believe them. I accept that.

The original:

Je ne t'ai pas demandé de partir, avais-je dit.

C'est toi qui l'as voulu, et si tu ne voulais pas te mouiller, mon coco, il ne fallait pas t'embarquer. Je ne t'ai pas poussé à l'eau et ce n'est pas moi non plus qui suis venue te chercher dans ton village ou dans ton champ, dans ta banlieue en ruine, pour t'arracher de là et te mettre dans ton foutu bateau qui prend l'eau, et maintenant tu patauges et je veux bien croire que tu as peur, et tu m'appelles à l'aide comme si c'était de ma faute, tu me demandes de te sauver et tu t'impatientes. Tu comptes sur moi. Mais moi je ne t'ai rien demandé. Alors laisse-moi faire mon boulot et prends ton mal en patience.

Et il faut croire que je l'avais pensé tellement fort, tout ça, que je l'avais dit à haute voix, la première phrase en tout cas, si l'on en croyait du moins les enregistrements et il n'y avait pas de raisons de ne pas les croire, je veux bien l'admettre.

Small Boat is Helen Stephenson's translation of Naufrage by Vincent Delecroix, the translator's second appearance on the International Booker list after Black Moses.

The novel is published by Small Axes, the imprint of HopeRoad Publishing run by Pete Ayrton (founder of Serpent's Tail, who also feature on the longlist) and distributed via their partnership with another wonderful small independent press, Peepal Tree Press. Peepal Tree and Hope Road have both previously featured in the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

The novel, although fictionalised, is based on the tragic real-life case of an inflatable dinghy, carrying at least 33 migrants across the English channel, which sunk in the early hours of 24 November 2021, with just two survivors. Twenty seven bodies were recovered and at least 4 are still missing. This was only four months after the leader of the UK party which now leads the national opinion polls and which is supported by the new Musk/Trump Axis, criticised a charity, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for being "a taxi service for illegal immigration" (see this story, I won't link to the Tweet).

The tragedy occured in part due to a lack of clarity between the English and French official coastguard servies as to whose maritime territory the boat was in, and hence who should be responsible for the rescue.

The independent Craston enquiry into the events from a UK perspective is underway in London during March 2025, as I was reading the novel, and the Opening Statement this week on behalf of the families of the bereaved and one survivor makes for a harrowing but necessary read. It opens:

Shortly after sunset on 23 November 2021, at least 33 people left dilapidated camps in Northern France. Many were exhausted, having already endured arduous journeys just to get there. They walked slowly under cover of darkness along abandoned train tracks to the long beach at Plage de la Digue du Braek, from where they would embark on what would be – for all but two – their final journey. The men, women, and children who crammed on to a small, unsafe boat that night were fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters; peoples’ loved ones; peoples’ friends. All made the journey in hope for the future. Kazhal Ahmed Khidhir Al-Jamoor left with her three children, Hadiya, Mubin and Hasti. Mhabad Ali Ahmed took a photo of herself and her friend Maryam ‘Baran’ Noori Mohammedameen, and sent it to her mother in Kurdistan: two young women smiling, just as anywhere else, sending a message of reassurance to a parent. These are just two examples. None could have possibly known the fate that would await them that night. This Inquiry will hear directly from our clients – the families bereaved by the events of the night of 23/24 November 2021 – of the profound impact of their loss. And it will hear from our client Issa Mohammed Omar, one of just two who survived, of the ordeal he suffered over 14 hours in the bitter, freezing, waters of the Dover Strait.

A few hours into the journey, the boat began taking on water. Those on board made urgent distress calls to emergency services in the UK and France. One of the victims on the phone with His Majesty’s Coast Guard (“HMCG”) pleaded “they are in the water... We are dying, where is the [rescue] boat?”. A Mayday Relay was issued, but a nearby French Navy vessel failed to assist. A Border Force Cutter was sent to rescue the boat, but abandoned its search having recovered three other boats, none of which matched the level of distress or desperation heard on the calls made by those on board. UK and French authorities failed to act with the urgency and coordination required to save lives. Systems were overwhelmed, calls were missed, and assumptions were made. How many of those on the boat had perished by the time the search was abandoned and how many remained alive can never be known.

Such uncertainty magnifies grief. In the words of Hussein Mohammedie, the father of Mohammed
Hussein Mohammedie: Imagine your child gets into trouble in the water, and you are not there and cannot help him. Imagine he stays in the water for 12 hours, and no one comes to his rescue. This is what we are always thinking about. It always stays in the front of your mind; the effect is there always. It makes life more difficult; when you lose someone you will always remember the grief.

Issa Mohammed Omar's own written testimony is here. And the other survivor gave his story here to the Rudaw Media Network in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Notably from the records of the enquiry, little information has been received from the French side on their account of the night, and one suspects vice versa in the French enquiries. But this novel draws on the records from the French side, particularly recordings of calls and conversation, which caused outrage for their apparent callousness.

But while the enquiries into the actions of the coastguards, and how they can better coordinate to save lives are vitally important, they can allow us to ignore our wider complicity in the tragedy. Why do we allow a world where asylum can only be sought by undertaking dangerous journeys, and indeed a world where so many need to seek asylum.

And the brilliance of this novel is it asks those questions, by not asking them, but by refusing to provide answers and leaving the reader to examine their own conscience, beginning with the epigraph, from Lucretius (given here in an expanded form - the novel stops at 'joy'):

"Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem; non quia vexari quemquam est iucunda voluptas, sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est."

This novel could have been an account of the events of that night from the perspective of the victims, but we have their testimony for that (see above). The middle of the book contains one, just 16 pages long, which does provide context, but which is, I think, meant to be read explicitly as a feat of imagined empathy on behalf of the policewoman (see below).

It could also have been an account of what did go wrong that night, or even a confession by those involved, but it is not that either. Or rather that what the unseen interlocutor, a policewoman, wants to hear from the our first person narrator she is interviewing, the young woman who was on duty that night a the CROSS (centres régionaux opérationnels de surveillance et de sauvetage) monitoring centre in Cap Griz-Nez, and who received a series phone calls from those on the boat seeking help, and whose recorded words - see the quote which opens my review - are played back to her.

But our narrator refuses to provide a confession, or an analysis of what went wrong, insisting that the policewoman is asking the wrong questions, and instead examines the issues through an unemotional, and philosophical lens, fond of quoting Blaise Pascal from Pensées, particularly "Vous êtes embarqué" and "Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre", translated here as "All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room".

She insists, to an increasingly incredulous, frustrated and angry interviewer, that she was not responsible for the plight of the refugees, and that far from needing to show more emotion and compassion, in her job is was important to stay calm, rationale and, yes, detached.

When asked to examine the events of the night she argues they started well before they embarked on the dinghy in the evening of 23 November 2021 (and note how this passage incorporates the Pascal quote and also ends with the opening line of the novel, the callous words she is on record for having said to the drowning refugees):

Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes. Maybe they even started to sink the day they got the idea in their heads that everything would be better elsewhere, when they started to want supermarkets and child support, when they heard about Social Security or when a cousin living in London told them you could become a billionaire doing the washing up in a Tamil pop-up. You could say, I repeated, that all their problems stem from their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.

But it’s because they have been turned out of their room, isn’t it, or because their room has been destroyed, she said.

But then who is drowning them? I asked. Who is banishing them, blowing on them, scattering them across the surface of the earth, and sweeping them towards the sea, where they vanish like dust shaken from the coat tails of humanity. What gigantic storm rises somewhere behind them, what gigantic sweep of a broom in Africa or Bangladesh or Afghanistan? One thing’s for sure, I’m not the one holding the broom, sweeping them across the earth’s surface and throwing them in the rubbish bin of the Channel. In short, you could ask: Who’s asking them to leave? Not me.

The narrator's voice is brilliantly done, highly compelling and even though the prose can seem circular the reader is grabbed and caught up in the tide - this was a novel I could have happily read for 500 pages, but equally pleased that Delecroix chose to keep it to such a short book, heightening its intensity (again the end of this passage takes us to Lucretius):

Between these two, what with questions I’ve since forgotten or gave up listening to, and answers which, as we went on, I made increasingly laconic, with the uncomfortable feeling that I was repeating the same thing over and over, I felt I was circling round and round the deflated dinghy, equidistant from the roles of victim and executioner, between amoral passivity and culpable intent. I saw myself sent back to my earlier lookout post on the top of the cliffs, with its stunning view of the Migrant Tragedy, contemplating the storm and the shipwreck from the windows of my station, shielded from the wind, shielded from feelings, indifferent, no, worse than that: getting secret pleasure from the spectacle, perhaps, glad to be there at my post, and not suffering the pitiful death throes of the reckless, contentedly murmuring Suave mari magno…

And the narrator increasingly realises what she is being asked - which is not to help save those lives that were lost or future such lives, not even to accept her guilt, but to provide comfort for the rest of us:

I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue. Not because I’d done what you’re meant to do. They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words.

On aurait voulu que je dise, je le sais bien, on aurait voulu que je dise : Tu ne mourras pas, je te sauverai. Et ce n’était pas parce que je l’aurais sauvé en effet, pas parce que j’aurais fait mon métier et que j’aurais fait ce qu’il fallait : envoyer les secours. Pas parce que j’aurais fait ce qu’on doit faire. On aurait voulu que je le dise, au moins le dire, seulement le dire.

That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place. The voice of the whole of humanity reassured to hear itself saying, uttering the words: I will save you; you will not die – not actually saving, no one cares about that, not acting, not even helping. But at least saying it, because to fail to say those words is to be less than human. In the end, whether they drowned or not didn’t matter; what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them.

But I said: You will not be saved.

Mais moi j’ai dit : Tu ne seras pas sauvé.

5 stars

The Press

HopeRoad was founded in 2010 by Rosemarie Hudson who has always wanted to encourage exciting new talent, mentor and publish those authors herself and bring them to wider attention. Her emphasis has been to promote writing from and about Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and thanks to her HopeRoad is known as a publisher which loves to share previously untold stories with themes of identity, cultural stereotyping, disability and injustice.

Rosemarie was joined in her venture in 2019 by Pete Ayrton, founder of the hugely respected independent publisher Serpent’s Tail. Pete is Editor of HopeRoad’s imprint, Small Axes.

Peepal Tree Press and HopeRoad Publishing are delighted to announce that from 1st February 2024 they are joining forces to secure and build the diversity of independent publishing in the UK. Peepal Tree Press and HopeRoad see in each other companies with a compatible ethos, backlists and complementary publishing identities.

The judges take

Following the disastrous deaths of 27 people, when a dinghy capsizes while crossing the Channel, the book’s narrator – who works for the French authorities and who had refused to send a rescue team – attempts to justify the indefensible and clear her conscience. In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity’s moral code appears fragile, where governments can condemn whole swathes of society to poverty or erasure, Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel.

[Khalilah D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exploration of conscience stripped bare in a world addicted to indignation and finger pointing. The narrator is a mirror facing each of us in the wake of such tragedies and that is a hard (but necessary) pill to swallow.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what happened to my review, but I hope this will win the International Booker.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding and incredible. I have to admit that when I first started this, I thought it was merely serviceable and not much else. And I think that had to do with real-life distractions getting in the way.

Today, I restarted it and read it the entire way through, in one sitting. And I was floored. Being stuck in this unreliable narrator, who seems allergic to accountability and is a master at deflecting, made me squirm. Now with someone with my moral compass, it’s hard not to judge this narrator, but interestingly enough, access to her worldview provides great insight on the world at large. The narrator keeps morphing and reshaping from monster to misguided to misunderstood to monster again, before our very eyes. It’s a morally complex deep dive.

“Empathy, I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.”

This quote pissed me off. But then it lingered & unnerved me as I tried to unpack its meaning —something all great literature should have the power to do —start taking on new meanings & unsettling the hell out of you.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025
A novel about the bystander effect and an examination of our collective desensitisation in respect to everyday horrors. For a short work quite recursive, and offering an ending which even the author himself calls something from a B movie.
There is no shipwreck without spectators

Featuring the death of 27 out of 29 migrants in their crossing of the Channel, we spend most of Small Boat not from their perspective, but rather in the mind of an unnamed officer from CROSS. Already the Wikipedia article on this agency shows the bureaucracy versus personal ethics tension at the heart of the novel: In France, the seven centres régionaux opérationnels de surveillance et de sauvetage (Regional Operating Surveillance and Rescue Centres; French acronym CROSS) coordinate maritime security and surveillance. CROSS conducts their activities under the authority of the maritime prefects in mainland France and government representatives for state action at sea in Overseas France.

While Vincent Delecroix his writing is good, I did expect more, and even for just over 120 pages, the book at times felt repetitive, reflective of the state of mind of our suspended main character. Maybe this is also a reflection that we can't progress and seem to be stuck in a loop of looking away, but I found Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia a more effective meditation on the same topic of how we as society look away from ethical questions, and just outsource them to invisible fringes of society. The main character makes a link with homelessness and despair being all around us, yet we can close ourselves off from this immediate suffering, let alone from more distant events that appear at times to be no more than numbers in accounting or newspaper headlines.

Section II, the briefest of the 3 parts the book is divided into, hammers home how people are literally dying every single day for the dream of working in a grocery store, in a safe country.
The cargo ships passing by to deliver our luxuries makes this section poignant and I was reminded of a quote which I associate with one of the books of R.F. Kuang or N.K. Jemisin on how every amenity and luxury in a capital is predicated upon the exploitation and misery at the edges of the empire, in this case the Western world exploiting labour of undocumented migrants for the most menial jobs.

The last section, featuring Léa, the young daughter of the narrator and Eric, her ex with Front National ideologies and finally Julien, a co-worker with philosophical, and in particular cynical, tendencies, is unfortunately less impactful in my view.
An important topic, and worthy in how it serves as an J'Accuse...! in respect to our complacency and acceptance of tragedies, as long as they don't hit people like us.

Quotes:
You will not be saved

I didn’t ask you to leave, I said.

Every night, the same voice, the same pleas, because it doesn’t matter how many times you pull this idiot out of the water, back he comes - one time, ten time, a hundred times.

That’s a given, and it’s the first thing they teach you in this job. I’m required precisely not to have convictions or a conscience.

Yes, I confirmed, when the sinking started: that’s the real question we need to answer. Because these people were sunk long before they sank.

I’m accused of lacking a soul, but my soul is precisely what I leave in the cloakroom when I get to work, it simply can’t fit into my uniform.

Empathy, I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering. Good for them. But the truth is you can’t do both at once.

What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so unremarkable, so common and so universal - indeed the basis of everyday life - that one could conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us.

I kind of lost sight of what a human life is, with these shedloads of migrants getting dumped in the sea every day.

Don’t you get it? You will not be saved.

Why save one, ten, twenty; it’s all the same, since you can’t save them all.

Even with their eyes shut, people are still watching, and I can’t think of a single one who could say: I wasn’t there.

Longlist International Booker Prize 2025 ranking
Shortlisted books in bold
1 Under the Eye of the Big Bird - 4.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2 On the Calculation of Volume I - 4.5 stars rounded down, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
3 The Book of Disappearance - 4 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
4 Eurotrash - 4 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
5 Perfection - 3.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
6 A Leopard-Skin Hat - 3.5 stars rounded down, review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
7 Reservoir Bitches - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
8 Heart Lamp: Selected Stories - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
9 Solenoid - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
10 Hunchback - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
11 On a Woman's Madness - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
12 Small Boat - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
13 There's a Monster Behind the Door - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025]

Having recently read and loved Albert Camus's The Stranger, it was interesting to read a more contemporary French novel also by a philosopher that explored similar ideas in a tone that reflected the near absurdity of life, of being a human, all through the eyes of a seemingly detached and off-putting narrator.

The story follows a woman who works for the French navy monitoring the English Channel/La Manche at night. She's often tasked with responding to distressed calls from immigrants attempting to cross the channel to seek refuge in the UK.

On one particular night, based on real events in November 2021, a raft of 29 immigrants meets its end. Their deaths are presumably due to the lack of urgency and consideration by the narrator who claims that help is on the way, though it is not. And her cut and dry attitude is in stark contrast to public sentiment about her perceived culpability in their undoing.

What Vincent Delecroix delivers here is a philosophical thought experiment in a stunning three-part novella that will cut you to your core. He doesn't write off the narrator's thoughts & feelings, but weaves them seamlessly into the prose in a way that forces the reader to read between the lines and consider one's own opinions and, most importantly, actions.

Each section of this book took a surprising turn. I'll avoid spoiling anything because at only 110 pages this book is one you will find hard to keep reading but not want to put down, discovering it for yourself in quick bursts. It was purposefully uncomfortable and in my eyes incredibly effective. I think this is a book that should be required reading, and one that I can definitely see winning the 2025 International Booker Prize.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025
English: Small Boat
Based on the real drowning of 27 refugees in the English Channel in 2021, French philosopher Delecroix shows a female coastguard who takes the emergency phone calls, but fails to help the migrants - and of course, the short text centered on an average woman is a parable for the West failing to solve the migration crisis, an allegory for societal rationalizations. Instead of allowing for abstraction and pointing to institutions and collective systems though, Delecroix conveys the dimensions of personal responsibility, thus questioning the role of most readers in the current situation. Are we trying and failing? Are we looking away while verbally maintaining that we are taking action to the best of our abilities? Are we claiming that others need to step up, not us? Are we lying to others, lying to ourselves?

Constructed as a triptyque with the short middle part displaying a detached description of the drowning and the title-giving actual "naufrage" (which means shipwreck - the title of the translation fails to convey that the boat is not the only shipwreck here), the text refrains from morally judging the woman; rather, it shows a person desensitized by regularly getting such calls, regularly seeing refugees die. She points to the question whether others (here: the English) were responsible, she gets entangled in contradictory arguments, is torn between her professional need to not get carried away by emotions and her human responsibility to empathize with the suffering of others, she sees herself and the dead as collateral damage, victims of a machine, as Delecroix explains here. The author intends to show the infamous banality of evil, and highlight the importance of learning empathy: "Mais pour se projeter à la place de l'autre, nous devons aussi développer notre faculté d'imagination" (see here).

Frequently, the questioning the woman endures from outside forces, the police and the public, merges with her interrogating herself, grappling with her own moral convictions, her role in her job and as a mother, a citizen, a private person. It shows that the author is a philosopher, as he employs the novel to ponder our morality, but that's also the weakness of the text: It's often unsurprising and rather obvious, the meandering rationalizations of the protagonist make sense psychologically, but did not captivate me.

Let's see how far this one will go.

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small Boat is an intense examination of one coast guard employee’s insistent refusals to accept moral responsibility for the part she played in a European naval disaster in November 2021. Although the author makes it clear the book is a work of fiction, it too closely mirrors a real incident that took place in the same area, at the same time.

In the book, police detectives consider whether they should charge a female coast guard with criminal intent after she uttered several lies and disparaging words to a young migrant who called several times for help from a sinking boat. In the end, she failed to rescue the group of 29 migrants. Two survived and 27 drowned while attempting to cross the English Channel between France and Britain in a small dinghy that was obviously not sea-worthy and certainly not for a group as large as theirs. But she refused to take responsibility—at least, no more responsibility than anyone else involved.

I have to admit that, for me and probably for many of you, Small Boat was an extremely difficult book to read. The details of the disaster were difficult, and the woman’s constant denials were difficult. In fact, there is nothing about this book that was easy. It was horrific from the first word to the last. Had she become so desensitised by daily tragedy that she was unmoved by this man’s cries for help? Would it make sense, then, for periodic psychological testing to be instituted for occupations dealing with frequent human disasters, such as coast guards, ambulance workers, firefighters, etc.?

And exactly what does this say about the combined state of our humanity? Are we ALL to blame? Has the allure of instant, live footage of wars, natural disasters, and myriad tragedies hardened us all to others’ despair? My God, I certainly hope not, because I would NOT want to live in a world full of those who cannot shed even a single tear for the hopeless cries of another human being.

4 “Let–your–conscience–be–your–guide” stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Amy Biggart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ooof — this book is pretty fantastic.

The bulk of this book takes place in an interrogation room, and that's sort of how this book feels. Like an interrogation, an interrogation into your own internal politics and your selfishness. I think on its surface, this book is about a woman who veers toward the sociopathic, who is so detached from humanity that she denies help to a migrant boat with 27 drowning people on it, begging for a rescue from the French coast guard.

And you hate her, you really do. Throughout this interrogation, she's callous and shifty, she throws blame in other directions, plays the victim, and downplays the scenario. But there are so many moments where she says something that will catch you — because she also tells the truth sometimes. She tells the truth that, in fact, most people would deny help to a migrant boat. Most people already do exactly that in small ways every single day. Ignoring the needs of the world's most vulnerable and precarious people, in favor of self interest or simple, head-in-the-sand ignorance.

I think there are some other choices in this book that worked particularly well, but I won't spoil anything for you. What a crazy book that so accomplishes what it sets out to do that I have to applaud it. If this peaks your interest (or even if it doesn't but you can digest literary fiction), I would highly recommend it. It'll challenge you in unexpected ways and surely infuriate you.

[leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

a powerful and very topical novel which examines the complexities of the migrant crisis and the moral dilemmas we face when considering our complicity in it. inspired by the real-life november 2021 english channel disaster, in which 27 migrants drowned, the story follows a radio operator in france who took the distress calls from the sinking dinghy and is now facing accusations of negligence. while the novel explores the uk and france vacillating between who should accept responsibility, it also largely speaks to us as global citizens who all bear witness to these tragedies, a moral responsibility that isn’t simply confined by borders. it’s a book that forces you to reckon with some uncomfortable truths, and one i recommend everyone to read.

4.5

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

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?

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.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley

[Carl (Hiatus. IBB in Jan) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix’s first translated novel into English by Helen Stevenson (first published in French as Naufrage in 2023) lays out a harrowing portrayal of the widely reported tragedy of a migrant boat that sank in the English Channel. Set against the backdrop of a record number of attempted crossings, with around 7,000 migrants in 2021 alone, the novel delves into the moral dilemmas and questionable protocols faced by coastguards tasked with monitoring and responding to emergencies in the English Channel.

The narrative is fully realised, meticulously exploring the ethical complexities surrounding the tragedy. A distressed migrant dinghy, carrying twenty-nine people, sent out a desperate plea for help. Fourteen times in total. The protagonist, a self-absorbed coastguard officer, is portrayed brilliantly through Delecroix’s sharp and incisive narrative. She serves as a device to explore complex questions of morality, convoluted protocols, and jurisdictional boundaries, all aligned with her lack of moral compass and unreliability, forcing the reader to confront philosophical questions about the systemic xenophobia embedded within society.

As a philosopher, Delecroix exposes the stark reality of emotional detachment required in some professions and the bureaucratic inertia that, exemplified by the protagonist’s initial reluctance to act due to technicalities that hinder the rescue operation raising ethical questions, ultimately leading to the death of twenty seven migrants. “I had no more opinion on the migrants than I did on migration policy or the right to asylum, relations between North and South, problems, solutions, the woes of the world, injustice: I was not required to have an opinion on the migrants.”

Her dispassion is striking as she rationalises her inaction by emphasising the boat’s proximity to British waters while a French vessel is only minutes away from the rescue spot. Her self-absorbed cynicism is evident in passages where she recounts the calls between the victims and herself. I often found myself baffled by the protagonist’s absurd rhetoric and appreciated the challenge it posed to my own moral principles. “You can’t see the harm in this?”

This book raises profound moral and philosophical questions, particularly through the protagonist’s internal monologue as she grapples with her role in the tragedy. Her justifications, often laced with sarcasm and a disturbing indifference towards migrants, reveal the insidious nature of dehumanisation in the migration crisis. Delecroix skillfully exposes the widely prevalent systemic xenophobia in France through the protagonist’s observations of societal attitudes. The powerful metaphor of the sea as Leviathan, devouring the vulnerable, emphasises the book’s exploration of deep-rooted forces at play, bigger than one individual alone.

At a pivotal moment, the book shifts perspective, offering a harrowing account of the tragedy through the perspective of an unnamed survivor, adding a deeply emotional depth to the narrative. Since Jeremy Harding provides a thorough account of the events in his foreword, some readers may find this section redundant. However, it ultimately enhances the novel’s impact, reinforcing its themes of loss and injustice.The final section of this remarkable novella is astonishing and compelling, demanding both attention and sensitivity from the reader.

Small Boat is a powerful, timely, and necessary novel. It challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about migration, empathy, and the human cost of bureaucratic negligence. Delecroix’s skilful use of language and narrative structure creates a haunting and unforgettable reading experience. Highly recommended for those seeking a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding migration and ethical dilemmas.

Rating: 5.0/5

Disclaimer: I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Quotes might differ slightly from the final printed version:

“I didn’t ask you to leave, I said. It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job. And apparently these thoughts were so strong that I actually spoke them out loud.”

“Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes. Maybe they even started to sink the day they got the idea in their heads that everything would be better elsewhere, when they started to want supermarkets and child support, when they heard about Social Security or when a cousin living in London told them you could become a billionaire doing the washing up in a Tamil pop-up. You could say, I repeated, that all their problems stem from their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.”

[Harun Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You will not be saved."

২০২৫ সালের ম্যানবুকার পুরস্কারের সংক্ষিপ্ত তালিকায় থাকা উপন্যাস "small boat" সত্য ঘটনা অবলম্বনে রচিত। ২০২১ সালে সমুদ্রপথে ছোট্ট এক ডিঙি নৌকায় ফ্রান্স থেকে ইংল্যান্ডে যাওয়ার সময় দুর্ঘটনার কবলে পড়ে এর অবৈধ অভিবাসী যাত্রীরা। বারবার ফোনে সাহায্যের আবেদন করলেও ফ্রান্সের কোস্টগার্ড জানায় যে তারা ইংল্যান্ডের জলসীমায় আছে এবং সাহায্য সেখান থেকেই আসবে। কিন্তু ৩ ঘণ্টার মধ্যেও সাহায্য আসেনি।ডিঙি নৌকাটি ডুবে যায়, অন্তত ২৭ জন যাত্রী সমুদ্রের কনকনে শীতল পানি সহ্য করতে না পেরে মৃত্যুবরণ করে, বাঁচে মাত্র ২ জন। এ ঘটনায় ফ্রান্সের কোস্টগার্ড নারীটিকে বিচারের কাঠগড়ায় দাঁড় করানো হয়। তার জিজ্ঞাসাবাদের অংশ থেকে অনুপ্রাণিত হয়ে লেখা হয়েছে এ উপাখ্যান।

অভিযুক্ত অনাম্নী কথক নারীটির প্রথম ভাবনাই হচ্ছে "আমি তো তাদের নিজ দেশ ত্যাগ করতে বলিনি। তাদেরকে তো আমি বাসা থেকে টেনে আনিনি, শীতের রাতে সাগর পাড়ি দেওয়ার জন্য উদ্বুদ্ধ করিনি, তাহলে তাদের অপঘাতে মৃত্যুর দায় আমাকে কেন নিতে হবে?" উপন্যাসের প্রথম অংশ পুরোটাই জিজ্ঞাসাবাদ নিয়ে লেখা। নারীটি তার কাজের যুক্তি দেয় এই বলে - প্রতিদিন শত শত অভিবাসী আসছে, তার কাজ তো অভিবাসীদের স্বাগত জানানো নয়, তাদের সাথে ভাব বিনিময় করা নয়, বরং তাদের ঠেকানো। তার ভাষ্য অনুযায়ী নৌকাটি ইংল্যান্ডের জলসীমায় আছে না কি ফ্রান্সের এটা সে আসলেই বুঝতে পারেনি এবং পরিস্থিতি অনুযায়ী স্রেফ ব্যবস্থা নিতে পারেনি। এখানে তার দায় নেই কোনো। উপন্যাসের দ্বিতীয় অংশে পাওয়া যায় নৌকাডুবির নিরাবেগ বর্ণনা। তৃতীয় অংশে আমরা আবার নারীটির কাছে ফেরত আসি এবং এ অংশের নৈতিক দ্বন্দ্ব-ই আসলে উপন্যাসটিকে অন্য উচ্চতায় তুলে ধরেছে। 

ধীরে ধীরে লেখক প্রশ্ন তুলেছেন, দুর্ঘটনার জন্য কি নারীটি একা দায়ী নাকি নিজেদের  মানবতার ধারক বলে চিৎকার করা পশ্চিমা গোষ্ঠী এমন অবস্থা তৈরি করেছে যাতে এমন ঘটনা ঘটার সুযোগ পায়? এই অবহেলা তৈরি হয়েছে কেন এবং কীভাবে যে অসহায় মানুষের আর্তনাদও তুচ্ছ মনে হয়? 
প্রসঙ্গত আমরা ১৯১৯ সালের জালিয়ানওয়ালাবাগ হত্যাকাণ্ডের কথা স্মরণ করতে পারি। ব্রিগেডিয়ার জেনারেল ডায়ারের নির্দেশে নিরীহ মানুষের উপর গুলি চালানো হয়েছিলো অবলীলায়। ইংরেজরা এ ঘটনাকে এক উন্মাদ সেনাকর্মকর্তার বিচ্ছিন্ন কাজ বলে চালানোর চেষ্টা করে। আমরা জানি (এবং ডায়ার জানতো), কয়েকশত তুচ্ছ নেটিভকে নৃশংসভাবে মেরে ফেললেও দিব্যি পার পাওয়া যায়। পরে আসলেও সে পার পেয়ে গিয়েছিলো। ডায়ার রোগ না, বরং রোগের উপসর্গ। 

ডিঙি নৌকার মানুষদের উদ্ধার করা প্রয়োজন কেন ছিলো?  শুধু কি তাদের বাঁচানোর জন্যেই? না বাঁচালে কি আমাদের মানবতা বাঁচে? আমাদের নিজেদের আত্মাকে ক্ষয় আর অধঃপতন থেকে রক্ষা করার জন্যে হলেও কি মানুষগুলোকে রক্ষা করা উচিত ছিলো না? কী হবে এ সভ্যতার পরিণতি যেখানে মানুষের মৃত্যুতেও ���েউ বিবেকের দংশন অনুভব করে না?
 "there is no shipwreck without spectators." জাহাজডুবি হলে তার প্রত্যক্ষদর্শী থাকেই, থাকে দায়। প্রশ্ন হচ্ছে, মানুষগুলো তো ডুবলো, কেউ তাদের রক্ষা করলো না, আমাদের রক্ষা করবে কে?

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crushing. A shame that the people in my life who would benefit from reading this probably haven't read a book for decades. And they wouldn't benefit anyway; I know people are set in their ways. A book will rarely change a person. But this made me feel very helpless. I'm glad it made it onto the shortlist; I don't bother reading the whole longlists anymore, but selectively reading, like this, works very well. Although Heart Lamp won, I don't feel all that compelled to read it for some reason.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phew, this was good. A woman working for the French Navy responds to the increasingly frantic calls from a group of 29 migrants as their dinghy taking them across the English Channel begins to take on water. For one reason or another, the woman really can’t be bothered to do much to assist, telling various lies and half-truths to the migrants, the English rescue services, and a French trawler in the area. 27 of the 29 migrants die.

Split into three sections, the first finds the woman speaking to a police investigator who attempts to get to the bottom of why these decisions, or lack of decisions, were made. The more she inserts her own personal judgements, the more defensive the woman becomes about her culpability.

Her line of thinking throughout the novel is circuitous and becomes philosophical as she tries to explain that it is impossible for just her to be responsible for this tragedy, that if she is guilty, then those who caused the migrants to be displaced also share in the guilt, the smugglers and the migrants themselves, who she watches enter the water night after night and call for help night after night, are not entirely innocent, that the people who sit on their couch and call her a monster and later walk by the homeless person sitting outside their office are just as guilty as she.

The second section gives voice to the migrants in the dinghy that night, who at first also aren’t too eager for a French rescue that will put them back at square one, but who, of course, become desperate for any intervention at all as their situation becomes dire.

The third section puts us back in the mind of the woman before she took herself to the police, though it makes the reader question whether the first section occurred in reality or was an imagined interrogation.
We’re given the smallest glance into her backstory and personal life. The philosophicall questions continue and there are some really compelling lines in this section.

This was fantastic and really well done. The urge to cast off the woman as an immoral lunatic, as the policewoman and those watching the news have essentially done, is understandable but misplaced. Because she’s not entirely wrong and it’s never really that simple. We squirm in our seats as we take our turn on the stand and assure ourselves we would do the right and moral thing every time, never faltering, never failing to save a single life. But that’s not true because we haven’t, we continually float while others sink, and often, they sink because we float.

So happy the International Booker put this one on my radar. For me, it’s the hidden gem of this year’s prize

Thanks to Hope Road & NetGalley for the eARC.

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh wow

[Uzma Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me 4 books and 1 viewing of the ironically Oscar-nominated American Fiction to realize Booker Prize shortlistees must be of the time. Must provide social commentary for today. Now, choosing a Booker Prize winner becomes a weighted decision—in itself a loaded question. How can a panel of authors and Sarah Jessica Parker decide just the right literary remedy for our world? Is such a task possible? Of course, this has me thinking a lot about what the winning of Flesh means, and, as some would suggest, it “puts male voices back at the center of fiction,” as if they’ve ever left, as if the greatest cancer society faces is the male loneliness epidemic! But I digress. All these realizations have made me grumpy over literary prizes. They are subjective decisions rendered objective. Bleh! But then…

Then I think of Small Boat. How this didn’t win the International Booker Prize is beyond me. This is the zeitgeist. THIS is humanity, or rather our self-prescribed apathy towards it. Small Boat asks if we have the responsibility to save each other, and on top of that, how can we do so if we can’t even save ourselves? Think, whenever anyone talks of the news, a common sentiment arises, being that we must stop watching time and again out of self-preservation, who’s heard this before? I know I’ve felt it! We cannot save the people on our screen…at the least, we must save ourselves. Oh boy. This ingrained value reflects disgustingly through our narrator, a rescue agent who failed to save a boat of migrants traveling from French to British shores. She reiterates that her job requires apathy, as an investigator interrogates her on supposed negligence, perhaps cruelty.

We want to disagree with our narrator. We want to say they would have been saved had she reacted differently. But how many times has the world turned a blind eye to brutality out of self-preservation? Better yet, how many times have we ourselves contributed to lives lost in Palestine, Congo, or China with remedies other than thoughts and prayers? I don’t know if it’s so much our fault. The world has made it difficult to save each other, and as such, we’ve adopted a sense of “othering” when we see people suffer. Sad, watching them flail in the sea while we stand dry on the shore. I do wonder… is apathy an inevitable symptom of society, or is it reversible? What do we do to change this? Man, this little book packs a punch. Brilliantly written and a sight to behold. Much to think about indeed

[jaz ₍ᐢ. ̫.ᐢ₎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

International booker
Book 2 of my journey through the International Booker Prize! I am once again reading the entire shortlist, it has become a fun way to find new favourite books and challenge myself. I will be filming it all for my Youtube Channel!

The rage I felt reading this little book. Impactful and intense story. The main narrator is a woman who takes a distress call coming from a boat carrying nearly 30 migrants as they try and cross the channel. This woman is horrendous, she is a monster in all sense of the word, she is desensitised and used as a device in this story to showcase the bystander effect. This definitely feels like a top contender for the winner of the international booker….

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intense, horrible and important. Not an easy read.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the 2025 International Booker shortlist - a very thought provoking look at the moral quandary of migrant deaths and our complicity as onlookers. Short but powerful.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a stunning, distressing and absolutely critical little book. I'm so glad that this has made it onto the International Booker Prize 2025 and that more people will have the opportunity to read this short gem of a novel.

In November 2021, a small boat carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized and sunk in the English Channel, which caused the deaths of 28 people. In the hours it took for the people to drown, they made several distressing calls to both the English and French authorities begging for help. Both countries exclaimed that they were the other one's 'problem' and to wait for help which was on the way. In reality, neither country acted fast or seriously enough to rescue them and only bodies of the deceased were discovered when it was too late.

This is based off a true, harrowing story which shakes me to my core every time I read about it. The book is told from the perspective of the phone operator who took a number of the calls from the people on the boat, who was recorded saying things like "I didn't ask you to leave" and other disgustingly dismissive remarks regarding their safety and situation - her handling of the call is ultimately regarded to be one of the reasons the migrants were not saved in time. What the book does brilliantly is delve into the mind of a person trying desperately to defend their lack of empathy and initiative when it came to the handling of the call, and calls into question the unconscious (or what becomes apparent, probably quite conscious) bias against those the media likes us to believe are less worthy of life. The book not only puts us face to face with the detrimental arguments made by those such as the alt-right, but strikingly causes us to question the world's complicity in the lack of empathy and refuge for people trying to survive the effects of racism, xenophobia and war all across the world.

The middle portion of this book almost brought me to tears, as it details the events on the sinking dinghy from start to finish. It juxtaposes the lavish excuses the phone operator uses to defend herself with the brutality of the life and death situation the migrants were in. Whilst the book is wholly political, it is also brilliantly written, cleverly constructed, and a book that I think almost everyone needs to read.

[Spyros Batzios · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is less than a month now since the US President administration warned more than half a million of migrants to leave the country or they will be deported. Our world is in turmoil, and if you think about it, while we are safe in our bubbles there are people out there that live under horrible conditions or even dying. In a way, we have lost sight of what being human is and we stopped asking why do men, women and children, all over the world, decide to get into a dinghy and flee their country? Why do they drown in the sea every night? “Small Boat” by Vincent Delecroix, will make you wonder and urge you to try and actively respond those questions. It is based on a true incident that happened in November 2021, when an inflatable dinghy carrying 29 migrants that were trying to cross the Channel and reach the UK, sunk in the sea. They repeatedly called the authorities on both sides of the sea but unfortunately no help was sent, resulting in the death of 27 of them. This book is the fictional testimony of the woman who was working for the French navy and was accused later on of failing her duty. The story is very strong and cruel and the writing is impactful and beautiful. The book will make you feel; it will fill you with emotions ranging from anger and desperation to compassion and love. It will make you think about our collective and personal responsibility towards what is happening to other people and will make you question on the timing when tragedies like this one start: do the boats sink at the actual time when water starts getting in, or as the narrator says, the sinking starts ages ago when those people are forced to leave their homes?

This is a book about refugees, asylum seekers and migration policies. People fleeing poverty and war, feeling helpless and in despair. Inflatable boats and rescue missions. Survival, resignation and waiting for help that will never come. A story about personal and collective responsibility. Guilt and innocence, that are both conditional. Blame, pointing the finger and the difficulty of admitting that you were wrong. Keeping your eyes stubbornly closed in front of the truth and the hypocrisy of judging others. It is also a book about the sense of duty and negligence. Professionalism and making rational decisions that are not affected by emotion; the expectation to leave your soul outside of your workplace. A book about moral values and conscience. Having an opinion and the absence of opinion that is an opinion itself. Bad journalism and the need of the media to find a scapegoat. Introspection and reflection. Remorse and absolution. Words that become more important than actions. But most of all it is a book about humanity and the value of human life in our world of good and evil. Our suffering of cynicism, lack of empathy, and detachment. Our insensitivity towards human suffering and our distancing from a difficult situation because it is easier. Dehumanizing behavior, the air of couldn’t care less and human cruelty as a reason of death. Life stripped bare, humanity in question and our failure to act as descent human beings.


Why should you read “Small Boat”?

Because you will witness, all at once, one the one hand the beauty and grace, and on the other hand the catastrophic power of the sea.
Because you will understand that we are all eager to judge others for what they didn’t do even though we ourselves don’t do anything as well.
Because you will see that the presumption that when there is a moral failing the source is a previous life trauma, isn’t always correct.
Because you will acknowledge that the fact that you didn’t need help or that you needed and nobody helped you is not a justification for your denial to help others.
Because you will feel how better our world would be if we would put ourselves in the shoes of others.
Because you will accept that where sense of duty fails humanity should prevail.
Because you will acknowledge that we cannot afford to lose our humanity, even for one second.
Because if you are human enough, you will dismiss your refusal to face what is happening in the world and you will feel complicit in the suffering of migrants.


Favorite quotes:

“We’re not listening to this just to make you feel bad, she tried to assure me, in a gentler tone, she was simply trying, she insisted, to shed some light on what had happened. I had to smile because shed some light on seemed to me a particularly unfortunate expression, seeing as how it is precisely at night, in the deep dark of night, that everything happens. Shed some light, I murmured, is exactly what we need to do”.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to stay sitting quietly in the room”.

“Yes, I confirmed, when the sinking started that’s the real question we need to answer. Because these people were sunk long before they sank. Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes”.

“I’m accused of lacking a soul, but my soul is precisely what I leave in the cloakroom when I get to work, it simply can’t fit in my uniform. I pick it up again intact from my locker when I leave”.

“…how inhumanity develops while no one is looking”.

“I may not have given much thought to the ongoing legal investigation, but I did think a lot, because that’s what happens when you sit and look at the sea: either you think a lot, or you think about nothing, which is probably another way of thinking”.

“I have no problem listening to the recordings of that night and hearing my own voice, because it’s not the voice of a monster or criminal on the tape - it’s the voice of all of us”.

“But it’s not something you can add up. Apparently, saving is the norm, what do you do, routine. It’s not an extraordinary action; It's quite ordinary, not the exception but the rule. And it leaves no trace, almost as little as of the people who vanish in silence into the abyss and are absorbed, digested, sometimes even spat back out by the sea. All that is normal - as though normal life was just like that - everyone saving everyone all the time. That’s how the human race survives; no need for Jesus Christ to save the world; we’ve been doing it perfectly well ourselves since the dawn of time, in every tiny provincial village. Salvation, if we are going to use big words, is something we offer each other every day”.

“But it’s enough for one to be lost and there is always one, there has to be one - and it’s as if you had saved no one”.

[Robbie Claravall · Rating 1 out of 5]

The dilemma at the heart of SMALL BOAT is whether the protagonist, a French radio operator trained to act without conscience or conviction, should have intervened to save a sinking dinghy of migrants in the Channel—knowing full well that by the logic of jurisdiction, resources, and protocol, they were ‘no longer her responsibility’ for they were outside the territorial bounds of her mandate.

There’s a difference between placing the reader in the shoes of another and using those shoes to walk the reader somewhere they never agreed to go to. In the second section, Delecroix makes this trespass explicit: the narrative breaks its frame, puts on a mask, and assumes the voices of the drowning. What begins as a restrained procedural is replaced by a full-throated performance of suffering. The ambiguity that animated the first section, the discomfort of watching someone who has mastered the art of apathy veer unto the edge of guilt, is flattened into theatre. Suddenly, we are no longer watching her fail to make the distinction between a yachtsman and a Kurdish child; we are made to hear the child’s pleas as she drowns. We are no longer navigating the ethical vacuum of policy and protocol; we are now choking on water, gasping on a satellite phone. This is dramaturgy, scripted for maximum extractive sentiment. The intimacy is not earned, and it certainly is not honest. It’s a rhetorical ambush: feel this, or you’re complicit. Grieve now, or you were never human to begin with.

What gave the novel its initial charge—its charge, not its resolution—was the tension between apathy and accountability. It made room for the possibility that to act ‘correctly’ within a system is not to act ethically, that to follow rules is sometimes to elude one’s own conscience. The operator’s voice, stripped of affect, layered in defensiveness and denial, was its most complex terrain, but the second section strips away that subtlety to enforce, like a ventriloquist, emotion. What begins in silence drowns in noise. Delecroix does not trust the reader to remain in unease; instead, he trumpets a crescendo of empathy as if its volume alone could substitute for insight. There’s nothing more manipulative than appropriated grief passed off as moral truth, and nothing more cowardly than a novel that begins with hard questions only to answer them with coercive feeling. It sidesteps the ethical vertigo it so carefully constructs then moralises them from the wreckage it refuses to sit through. What we’re left with isn’t a novel about responsibility, but a popcorn bestseller written post-disaster, performed for an audience already seated, already guilty, already clapping.

[Lee Collier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single person should read this book, full stop.

This is a stream of conscious style recounting of an event experienced through the life of a French naval officer working as a coast guard support agent. We are immediately thrown in to an interrogation that grapples with culpability in a tragic event where said naval officer responded to an emergency call from a drowning vessel between the French and English territories.

The first 50% of this short novella centers us around the interrogation and the mental gymnastics the naval officer deploys to relieve herself of some complicity in the eventual drowning of the vessel's passengers. I think that Delecroix stretches your moral compass in a really meaningful manner and will have you second guessing your stance in the manner at hand, saving human lives at all costs, in ways you have never experienced before.

The second part of the novel is a retelling of the events from the passengers' perspective and was truly difficult to read, specifically because this is based off of an actual event. This, being the shortest part of the novella to me signifies the perspective of the situation, the catalyst event being a short blip in time and finite in nature but having incredibly lasting value on the naval officer and families affected.

There are so many grand quotes in this 106 page novel and it is absolutely a deserving read. I am still grappling with the story and moral compass inquiries it tugs upon. There are two quotes I will leave you with, one of which is based on the necessary admonishment of the sea and it's vast infinite powers we can never control and the second is more acutely a quandary you will be forced to navigate amongst the text itself:

"Every sailor fears the sea unless they're total idiots, in which case they're no sailor. And you can't really love the sa, strictly speaking, if loving means trusting, not fearing, if it means believing that what you love will be good for you, or at least, let's say, wishes you well. So maybe I shouldn't say I loved the sea, because it isn't something you can love."

"Why save one, ten, twenty; it's all the same, since you can't save them all. There is always one left. Even if you saved all of them, there would always be on left, one you din't even know existed. And the one that you save will perish tomorrow or the day after, here or elsewhere. So why bother?"

Let that sink in and if I have even remotely caught your attention, read this book upon publishing next year. Thank you Mariner for the ARC and opportunity to read this translated work before it's intended April US publishing.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue… What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words.

This would make a good companion piece with The Death of Murat Idrissi, or even Le Guin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” A woman, working for the French coastguard failed to send help to a migrant boat in distress, and 27 people lost their lives. She is under investigation. Is she to blame? And what, exactly, is she to blame for? Their deaths, or something more insidious?

This slim 120 page book is written by a philosopher, and though I usually poke and philosophers’ works from afar with a long stick, I felt Delecroix chose the perfect way to tell this story — from the perspective of the perpetrator (one, or perhaps a continent full), rather than from the victims (though that would be a great take for another book). Ultimately, the story of the drowning migrants is the story of how we have chosen to structure our societies, our borders, and our priorities. And the book is full of uncomfortable, possibly untrue, but always familiar, comments like this:

I couldn’t exactly say how long I had had this thought, this conviction that didn’t even really have the force of a conviction: that one person has to drown in order for another one to breathe properly, and that the air we breath in is another’s dying breath…. People accuse me of not pulling myself in their place, I thought once more. But the truth is exactly the opposite: I am in their place because I’ve taken their place, and the ones that drown are taking my place, and they are drowning so I can stay on the surface.

Delecroix takes a risk which to me paid off, in making the coastguard quite unlikable, and also actually to blame, not the victim herself of short-staffing or hostile superiors, only the result of literal thinking taken to an extreme. The boat must be rescued by the British, because it is in British waters. Her troubles are down to the fact that the corpses floated back into French waters. Her ex-husband is xenophobic, she quickly comes to seem so too. But the appalled police officer who interviews her is her mirror image, in hairstyle, in jawline, in everything, and so again, who is under investigation?

There is no shipwreck without spectators. Even when there’s no one, when it’s far out at sea, at night, without witnesses, when there’s no living soul in sights for thousands of nautical miles, only waves and the viscous night, covering everything, swallowing everything; when there are no more eyes to see than there are arms to reach out, there are still spectators and the shore from which they are watching is never far away, even if, at the same time, it is infinitely distant.

[alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

an uncomfortable yet incredibly thought-provoking read.

this book is based on the november 2021 migrant boat tragedy between the waters of france and england, which i was unfamiliar with prior to reading this. it’s obviously a difficult story to follow due to the fact that this was a real situation.

i liked the structure of this novel. i like that we get a peak into the mind of the woman who was supposed to save the migrants, and how she ultimately failed them. there’s also a level of zooming out and seeing how their deaths were caused by societal failure at large, which is an important conversation to have. however, i did find it difficult to listen to the narrator deflect blame when she clearly was responsible to some degree. that’s certainly a strength from the author; we’re meant to be uncomfortable reading this.

it did get repetitive at times. i also found the language to be a bit too flowery to the point of almost being gaudy—i just don’t think it was a necessary aspect to telling this story.

tl;dr: a hard read about a very important issue

[Puella Sole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Promišljeno, razrađeno, sviđa mi se rimtička struktura pripovijedanja i organizacija poglavlja koja odgovara predstavljenom događaju (uz napomenu da nekim dijelovima ne bi loše došlo malo dinamike). Glavna asocijacija: kamijevski.

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
July Pick for Service95 Book Club

• Small Boatread the translation by Helen Stevenson, Mar 25-Apr 1
• Naufragerereading in the original french, as A. is reading the translation for the first time! July 19—Aug 17

*

opening lines:

I didn't ask you to leave, I said.
It was your idea, and if you didn't want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn't have embarked. I didn't push you into the water, I didn't fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water's up to your ankles, I get it that you're frightened, and you want me to save you and you're impatient. You're counting on me. But I didn't ask you for any of that. So you'll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.

opening lines in french:

Je ne t'ai pas demandé de partir, avais-je dit.

C'est toi qui l'as voulu, et si tu ne voulais pas te mouiller, mon coco, il ne fallait pas t'embarquer. Je ne t'ai pas poussé à l'eau et ce n'est pas moi non plus qui suis venue te chercher dans ton village ou dans ton champ, dans ta banlieue en ruine, pour t'arracher de là et te mettre dans ton foutu bateau qui prend l'eau, et maintenant tu patauges et je veux bien croire que tu as peur, et tu m'appelles à l'aide comme si c'était de ma faute, tu me demandes de te sauver et tu t'impatientes. Tu comptes sur moi. Mais moi je ne t'ai rien demandé. Alors laisse-moi faire mon boulot et prends ton mal en patience.

*

The only response was the growling of the muddy sea, as though my cries had woken it from restless sleep and it was turning against me saying: Just come a few steps closer and I'll have you.
But had I made my point now? Had I done enough? Had my voice carried far enough to be heard, to be recognised as the voice of all of us? I put my hands back together once more and, taking a deep breath, I yelled: I did not ask you to leave.
(89)

*

J'ai dit très exac-tement, mais peut-être était-ce lui qui disait cela, en se noyant, avec de l'eau de mer plein la bouche et tenant le téléphone muet au-dessus de sa tête qui s'enfonçait, alors que la communication était coupée et que je n'entendais plus rien, alors que je n'avais rien voulu entendre, alors que j'avais entendu sans entendre, j'ai dit, il m'a dit :
Tu n'entends pas, tu ne seras pas sauvé.
(154)

*

But I said: You will not be saved.
Mais moi j'ai dit : Tu ne seras pas sauvé.

_____

original short review: while only halfway thru the longlist, this book has immediately jumped to the top & I cannot stop thinking about it nor talking with others about it. it makes me a bit speechless & so highly recommend!!

[see opening lines in english v. french: I have some problems with this translation & am struggling to move forward from the first few pages… “mon coco” for example does NOT translate to “love” at all… (& this is speaking as one from a francophone city where the term “love” is used a lot & I continue to use it as a term of endearment…) the oxford french dictionary plus other places I researched says MAYBE could translate to “darling” or “pet” but more likely just “guy” “dude” or go even more derogatory & really shitty… also, the sentence structure is very different & so is the tone in parts… idk. is is not the only example but even changing how sentences are written, flipping her words about her opinions & reactions (the one speaking in the first section) with those about the “others” changes the way it’s read / what the author is saying…

these opening lines from the english translation stuck with me so much that I got really upset & struggled to move forward without wanting to flip between it & the original french, but pushing forward without looking at the translation onwards…!!

still & will always be thankful it was translated (just wish by someone else with more experience for such an important work) & still think it should’ve won the prize.]
___________________________________________

Translated from the French "Naufrage" (2023) by Helen Stevenson - the change in title from the much more neutral "Shipwreck” — it begins with a helpful introduction by Jeremy Harding who gives the historical context of the translation.

The Books & Music That Inspired Small Boat By Vincent Delecroix: https://www.service95.com/small-boat-...

The Organisations Supporting Asylum Seekers In France & The UK: https://www.service95.com/organisatio...

interview w/ author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

interview w/ writer & translator: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...

from the judges:

Following the disastrous deaths of 27 people, when a dinghy capsizes while crossing the Channel, the book's narrator - who works for the French authorities and who had refused to send a rescue team - attempts to justify the indefensible and clear her conscience. In a world where heinous actions often have no consequence, where humanity's moral code appears fragile, where governments can condemn whole swathes of society to poverty or erasure, Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit - and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel.