Published in France in 2023; published in translatino by Mariner Books on April 21, 2026
Small Boat is a novel of conscience. A woman lives with her guilt by denying her wrongdoing, by claiming — as so many people do when they make offensive or insensitive comments about members of groups to which they do not belong — that she was only saying what everyone else was thinking. But deep within her shriveled heart, she knows she was wrong — or does she?
The story is built upon a real-world event. In November 2021, migrants on an overcrowded rubber dinghy were attempting to cross the English Channel from France to England when their motor failed. As the dinghy began to take on water, a migrant made frantic calls to the rescue services of the British coastguard and the French Navy.
After some jurisdictional squabbling about whether the migrants were in French or British waters, it became clear that no British vessel was close enough to rescue the migrants. A French trawler spotted the dinghy and asked the dispatcher what it should do, but the trawler’s crew were told that a French vessel was on the way. The French Navy dispatcher, however, declined to send help and seemed annoyed that the migrants kept pleading for rescue.
Recordings reveal that the dispatcher told the migrants “Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved.” When a migrant protested “I’m up to my feet in water,” the dispatcher answered, “It wasn’t me who told you to leave.” Nobody rescued the migrants. In the days that followed, 27 bodies were recovered, most of them Iraqi Kurds. They would have been saved, but for the dispatcher’s obstinate refusal to act.
The first and last parts of the novel are narrated by a fictional version of the French dispatcher. In the first part, the dispatcher is questioned by police officers who are investigating her negligent (or perhaps willful) failure to send a rescue vessel to help the migrants. The dispatcher offers multiple excuses — she claims to have believed that the dinghy was in British waters or soon would be — and fails to take responsibility for her actions.
The dispatcher’s job is to save people, not judge them, but she has no patience with a police investigator who seems to be judging her. The dispatcher doesn’t believe it was her responsibility to “weep, weep for their wretchedness and the drowning of their dreams, weep with them and for them, which most certainly would not have saved them, but at least, apparently, would have saved me, would have saved my soul.”
The novel’s second part is a brief but horrifying third-person account of the passengers on the dinghy. The focus is on the young man whose cellphone still worked, who repeatedly called both England and France for help before he and the raft sank into the water, the initial event in his slow journey to death.
The last section reveals more of the dispatcher’s inner thoughts. She finds herself metaphorically drowning as she struggles to justify her inaction. She carries a resentment toward the world that seems to stem in part from her failed relationship with her daughter’s father, a white French nationalist. “When Eric left, when I had to ask him to leave and in the end he actually did, and I found myself alone with my daughter, and I couldn’t manage all alone with my little girl, and I was going under, who came to my aid, who tried to save me? No one.” She is entirely self-absorbed and thus has no time for the problems of migrants.
The dispatcher also believes that her interrogator judges her so she can feel better about herself. In the dispatcher's view, the interrogator wanted her to send help “so humanity could be reassured about itself, so humanity need not doubt its humanity, and so she would not have to fear what she’d become, that is to say, a woman like me, like the one I’ve become.”
The narrator also wonders whether there is any point to her job: “Why save one, ten, twenty; it’s all the same, since you can’t save them all. There is always one left. … And the one that you save will perish tomorrow or the day after, here or elsewhere. So why bother?” She is still in denial but is clearly haunted by thoughts (perhaps ghosts) of the dead migrants. “The night is full of voices calling, mingling with the sound of the waves which do not cradle me. All these voices like waves above the waves. Voices of men, women, cries, sobs, prayers and farewells. A great babbling in English, always the same words, the beseeching sea.”
Vincent Delecroix’s prose adds a lyrical quality to a powerful story. He illustrates how, in some people, self-justification overrides conscience and acceptance of responsibility. But the story also forces us to understand that every person who ignores the plight of migrants seeking refuge also shares responsibility for their fate. Small Boat is a short but intense examination of how the absence of compassion destroys lives, including the lives of those who are condemned to live with the guilt they try to suppress.
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