Small Boat: a devastating novel about the cruelty of indifference

The deadly results of detached officialdom are made painfully clear in harrowing novel.

- By Fiona Murphy

There's a particular kind of story that's rarely executed well — one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that’s the evil.

Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson - is that kind of story.

Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking in French, in English, in Kurdish for help.

They didn't get it.

What is known and not imagined in Delecroix's pages is that both French and British coastguards received their calls.

And both hesitated, passing responsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction.

The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect.

Delecroix doesn't give us the migrants' stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence.