Book name-SMALL BOAT
Author- Vincent Delecroix
Published by- Simon & Schuster
Price-Rs 399
Small Boat weaves a jolting, timely narrative inspired by a real-life tragedy in November 2021 when 27 migrants drowned in the English Channel after rescue was repeatedly delayed and diverted between French and British authorities. Translated from French by Helen Stevenson, Small Boat — shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize — refrains from offering us a tale of heroism or redemption. What is delivered instead is a moral provocation, whispered through the fatigued, frustrated voice of a French sea controller — perhaps the last voice those migrants ever heard. Through her, we confront the cold bureaucracy of borders, the erosion of empathy behind official narratives, and the haunting question: when does a boat begin to sink?
The book cover is eerily poetic — a solitary vessel with patches of foliage floating on a sea of deep blue scattered with faceless bodies. It conveys Small Boat’s juxtaposition of fragility and fatality, of life clinging to hope amidst encroaching death.
The unnamed narrator does not seek absolution. She offers no apology, no transformation, no tearful breakdown. What we get instead is a chillingly lucid voice — a woman trained to listen, but no longer able to hear.
Small Boat is, at its core, a book about the bystander effect — that quiet, moral paralysis that becomes a pervasive force when tragedy becomes routine and is normalised — as well as a sobering examination of our collective desensitisation to everyday horrors. Delecroix does not merely ask why help didn’t come for the migrants; he asks why have we grown accustomed to not expecting help at all.
Another telling aspect is the change of the title from the original French Naufrage — literally ‘shipwreck’ — to Small Boat in English. While ‘shipwreck’ highlights the catastrophe itself, Small Boat draws attention to the fragile vessel: overburdened, sinking, anonymous. The shift can be a reflection of the divergent cultural lenses through which the migration crisis is perceived — the French preoccupied with moral collapse, the British with containment. While interrogating the protagonist, the policewoman, in her inability to conceal
anger and possibly wounded pride, reveals how, on that fateful night, the British saved 98 lives while the French had 27 corpses back on their shore.
The narrator’s interior monologue in the imagined fictional perspective—preserved with grim precision in Stevenson’s translation — is not a confession but a slow, procedural exhale. “I’m not required to have convictions,” she says. “I’m paid to monitor maritime traffic.” She is not a villain. Nor is she a victim. She is, more disturbingly, a mirror: one in which we see ourselves, watching shipwrecks from the safety of the shore.
“You will not be saved.”
Perhaps she was only thinking these words. Perhaps she said them aloud. In the police interrogation that frames the novel, these statements are played back from recorded calls — spoken to dying people clinging to a failing dinghy, begging for help. What did she mean? What did she believe? The policewoman expresses bewilderment at the narrator’s complete disregard for conscientiousness. She is aghast at the seeming indifference, even monstrosity, of the coastguard’s tone as she fields desperate pleas from people who struggled for over three hours before drowning. The reader listens. And through her silence — or her reasonings — we begin to hear the mechanisms of a State built not on cruelty but on sheer indifference.
She knows what the world sees in her: a monster. A woman who lied to the British coastguards, who deflected responsibility. But she resists this frame. Instead, she deflects back: were the migrants already sinking before the boat took on water? What about the war in Syria, the famine in Sudan, the trafficking networks, the migration policy, the maritime mafia? Why is blame pinned on the last link in a long chain of abandonment? She is not running an NGO, she reminds the policewoman and the readers. She is not here to save everyone. Her job is not to care: it is to coordinate based on data, to analyse the situation at hand.
In one of the novel’s most devastating moments, she recalls telling a desperate caller, “I didn’t ask you to leave.” The man doesn’t make it that night. It is not the cruelty of the line that haunts her, but its truth. She didn’t ask them to leave. But neither did she help them arrive. The people on the line blur into a single voice — “the Migrant, Telephone Man, Sinking Man.” Every night, the same cries. Every night, the same drowning.
The metaphor of theatre recurs: the nightly drama of border control, rehearsed with weary roles — caller pleading, operator deflecting, media gasping, the public moving on. But Small Boat refuses to let us move on. It denies us the comfort of a resolution. There is no redemption arc. No final atonement. Just a sea that is unrelenting in swallowing everything and a continent that continues to avert its gaze.
“There is no shipwreck without spectators,” she notes, evoking Lucretius’s line quoted in the book’s epigraph. Delecroix’s philosophical training (he has written on Kierkegaard) is evident, but he never indulges in abstraction. The language is immediate, almost brutal in its clarity. Stevenson’s translation captures this perfectly — the clipped sentences, the evasions, and the unravelling composure.
If Small Boat disappoints, it is only for those who expect catharsis. What we get instead is a question — one not asked of the woman under investigation, but of us, the readers: what do we want from her? A confession? A scapegoat? Or simply the illusion that someone is being held accountable?
The novel takes us back to the truth that remains unspoken yet omnipresent: that until we establish safe and legal routes for asylum-seekers and migrants, we will continue to stage this tragedy — again and again — with only the cast of the drowned changing.