Small Boat - by Vincent Delecroix (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize

"A gut-punch of a novel...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."
--The 2025 Booker judges

A singular, gut-punching parable for our times about complicity in the face of tragedy, based on the true story of a French navy officer who ignored distress calls from migrants drowning in the English Channel.

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the English Channel, causing the deaths 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, nearly three hours later, all but two of the migrants had died, the worst single loss of life ever to occur in the Channel.

Vincent Delecroix's acclaimed Small Boat is a fictional first-person account of the French navy officer who took the migrants' calls--and her attempts to justify the indefensible. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster, than the crises behind these tragedies. What unfolds is a gripping, thought-provoking examination of the darkest threat to our humanity.

Powerful, forceful, and haunting, Small Boat confronts the most difficult but important moral questions of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?

"This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It's not an easy read - but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it's an essential story that needs to be told."-- Dua Lipa

Review Quotes

"A gut-punch of a novel...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."
--The 2025 Booker judges on Small Boat

"We are all reflected in the complex, unlikeable, utterly human, and nearly redeemable protagonist of the brilliant, slim novel Small Boat. This story of migrants drowning in the English Channel is a must read book of our time, this time in which we daily bear witness to a multitude of preventable tragedies just across our phone screens, and like Delecroix's rescue operative narrator, convince ourselves that we are helpless to act." --Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

"A brutally fearless exploration of migration and our complicity in the face of tragedy. Not only does this thorny, firecracker of a novel ask large, provocative questions about the plight of migrants, it is expertly crafted to take every reader beyond the headlines and sensationalism that plague one of the defining human rights issues of our time. Small Boat is political fiction at its absolute best."
--Ruben Reyes

"Vividly translated by Helen Stevenson, and currently on the shortlist for this year's International Booker Prize, Small Boat is painful, compelling and mercifully short, with a powerful undertow."
--Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Delecroix is both a novelist and a Kierkegaard expert: both pursuits lend themselves to the imagination of ethics at crisis point. Think of Small Boat as a philosophical ghost story."
--Telegraph

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

"A work of sickening power, it's won a deserved place on the International Booker shortlist."
--Daily Mail (London)

"A powerful reimagining of a migrant tragedy."
--Financial Times

"A work of striking empathy."
--Monocle

"This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It's not an easy read - but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it's an essential story that needs to be told."
--Dua Lipa

"Shocking and unsettling, Small Boat is an unforgettable modern tragedy."
--Paula Hawkins