Small Boat

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 news: 'There is no shipwreck without spectators . . . but not one person looks like getting up to step into the water.' As she struggles to distinguish personal and collective responsibility, she becomes convinced that when the sea claims a migrant boat, it claims us all." Jeremy Harding