Small Boat
France

Small Boat

by Vincent Delecroix

Immigration Literary Fiction 2023

Summary

One night, a small boat carrying migrants across the English Channel begins to sink. Desperate passengers call for help again and again, but the rescue they need never comes in time. Twenty-seven people die. At the centre of Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat is the woman who answered those distress calls—and who must now confront her role in the tragedy.

Inspired by the real-life Channel disaster of November 2021, this powerful novella unfolds through the perspective of an unnamed French rescue operator who insists that she alone cannot be held responsible. As she revisits the night’s events, her attempts to justify herself expose the uncomfortable distance between following procedures and doing what is morally right.

Delecroix transforms a devastating news story into an unsettling examination of guilt, indifference, and collective responsibility. Who is to blame when a human life is lost? An individual, a system, a border—or a society that has learned to look away?

Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Small Boat is a brief but haunting work that challenges readers to consider what it means to witness suffering and choose whether to act.

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Country
France
Europe
About the author
Vincent Delecroix
Vincent Delecroix

Vincent Delecroix is a French philosopher and novelist, born in Paris in 1969. He studied at the prestigious École normale supérieure and teaches philosophy at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His academic interests often intersect with his fiction, particularly in his exploration of ethics, responsibility, faith, and the contradictions of human behaviour. Delecroix has received major French literary recognition, including the Prix Valery Larbaud for Ce qui est perdu and the Grand Prix de littérature de l’Académie française for Tombeau d’Achille. His writing frequently examines how people respond to moral crises and how they explain their own actions when confronted with difficult truths. Originally published in French as Naufrage in 2023, Small Boat brought his work to a wider international audience. The English translation by Helen Stevenson was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025. Drawing on the 2021 deaths of migrants in the English Channel, the book asks difficult questions about personal accountability and the systems that allow suffering to continue.

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Details
Published
2023
Author
Vincent Delecroix