Small Boat
A Novel
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 21 abr 2026
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- $ 57.900,00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $ 57.900,00
Descripción editorial
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. As a coordinator of sea rescues in the English Channel, the unnamed narrator is regularly forced to decide whether to send or withhold assistance for sinking boats. Most often the doomed crafts are carrying refugees making the perilous crossing to the U.K., and her decisions frequently come down to whether the craft is in her country's waters, among other calculations. One evening, she communicates with a man on a raft of refugees drifting somewhere along the line between French and English waters. He calls her 14 times over the course of a couple of hours as the boat slowly sinks. All but two of the 29 aboard end up drowning. The news causes intense hand wringing on both sides of the Channel, and most of the novel consists of the narrator replaying that night as well as her subsequent exchange with a police investigator. The narrative takes on intriguing layers as the investigator grills her about her decisions and the recordings of her radio calls with the man, in which she attempts to absolve herself of guilt ("I didn't ask you to leave"). It's a satisfying exploration of a moral gray area. Correction: An earlier version of this review misdescribed a plot point.
