Small Boat

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

Vincent Delecroix is a French philosopher and writer. A graduate of the École normale supérieure, and agrégé of philosophy, he teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Delecroix received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for his novel Ce qui est perdu (published in 2006) and the Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française after he published Tombeau d'Achille (in 2008). Small Boat is the first of his novels to be translated into English.

Helen Stevenson studied Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and has been translating literary texts from French to English for 25 years. Her translations include Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou (shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2017), The Missing Piece by Antoine Bello and My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. She is also a writer of novels including Mad Elaine and Love Like Salt; A Memoir.