In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death 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, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?

Watch the interview with Dua Lipa and Vincent Delecroix on Spotify & YouTube and watch the author's reading here.

"A gut-punch of a novel" - International Booker Prize 2025 Judges

"Migrants are people too – this intricate novel shows why" - The Telegraph

“Vividly translated by Helen Stevenson, and currently on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize, Small Boat is painful, compelling and mercifully short, with a powerful undertow.” - Times Literary Supplement

"Remarkable piece of tragic fiction ... a superb translation by Helen Stevenson" - Literary Review

"It is a work of striking empathy." - Monocle

"A work of sickening power, it’s won a deserved place on the International Booker shortlist." - Daily Mail

"In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix’s novel is a necessary and merciless indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too." - The Conversation

'Vincent Delecroix is not just a writer but a philosopher, and it shows. His novel — shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize — reads less like fiction and more like an existential meditation on the value and meaning of life.' - BookBlast

'No one disembarks Small Boat without some culpability.' - World Lit Today

'At just 128 pages, Small Boat is also a small book. But its slim size belies its overwhelming moral force. Delecroix’s treatise on complacency and culpability in an unequal world has already earned its spot in the modern canon. It is sure to become indispensable for historians looking back at the 21st century, too.' -Foreign Policy

Read the recent BookBlast review here.

Ebook available on Kindle, Kobo, Bookshop.org and through your local library.