Here is a novel for thinking people, particularly those who possess some degree of empathy. If you’re at all interested in the world’s growing emigration issue, and/or particularly concerned with unnecessary immigrant deaths, you should read this book.
If you don’t fit the qualifications described above, read the book anyway. It might still change the way you think about things.
Small Boat, by Vincent Delecroix, was originally published in French in 2023 by Editions Gallimard as Naufrage (Sinking). The translated (by Helen Stevenson) English edition was published in 2025 by HopeRoad Publishing/Small Axes, whereupon it made the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist. The U.S. edition will be published on April 21 of this year by Mariner Books.
This short novel was written in just three weeks. It was inspired by an actual disaster which occurred in November, 2021—an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the English Channel, and 28 people drowned. It was reported that the French authorities received calls for help, but told the migrants they needed to contact the British authorities because their boat had entered English waters.
The book is narrated by the radio operator who took the migrants’ calls for help. Delecroix has said (according to Wikipedia) that the novel is “a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called ‘banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt put it.”
Delecroix realizes that objective brilliantly. As the 2025 International Booker Prize judges wrote, this is “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.”
I will reiterate that this is a brief novel, easily read in one sitting. Its brevity, though, is not what makes Small Boat such a quick, consuming read—the novel grabs and holds your attention because of its extreme relevance to the hate-mongering, point-scoring atmosphere in which we now live.
The novel’s three short sections each hit hard. In the first, we follow our (fictitious, remember) first-person narrator as she interacts with the little boat in the English Channel. The person who sits next to her has the same job and interacts with other groups trying to make it across the water to Britain. He reads Pascal and affects a “humanity is irredeemably flawed” attitude to justify keeping his emotional distance from the people in troubled waters. Our narrator tries to keep her distance as well, because she has been taught to be objective as part of the job, and because she has some difficulty in always being fully present when disaster unfolds. The things these two would-be rescuers say are recorded, and as the small boat in question is about to sink, our narrator tells the migrant on the phone “you will not be saved.” Prior to that, she has told him and those he speaks for that she wasn’t the one who told them to pack up and leave their homes. After the boat goes down, and she is later interviewed by a police officer (a women who looks and acts remarkably like her), she has trouble recalling all the particulars.
The second section, shorter still, recounts the tragedy from the migrants’ point-of-view.
In the final section, our narrator wrestles with herself and what she has done—or not done. Is she responsible for their deaths? All by herself? Do others share any responsibility? There is a suggestion that she is considering suicide, despite being a devoted mother and, she has thought up to this point, a generally responsible citizen and human being.
I can’t help but draw a parallel between the callousness our narrator is accused of and the sickening comments attributed to ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis after the killing of Renée Good. According to a former U.S. Marine cited in The New Republic, he and other protesters were told, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!”
Except our Small Boat narrator is in no way like the typical gun-toting, violence-prone ICE agent. She is much more like you, or like me.
So the question the book raises is, what do we, safe in our comfortable homes, owe to people who die while trying to migrate to a better life? Anything? A regretful sigh? A sorrowful click of the tongue? A decision to campaign for humane immigration laws?
Read the book, and see what you think.