Small Boat

By Vincent Delecroix

In November 2021, the sinking of a migrant boat in the English Channel caused the death of twenty-seven people. Despite their numerous calls for help, the monitoring center did not send the emergency services.

Format: Paperback

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Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and Dua Lipa's monthly read for Service95 Book Club

They would have wanted me to say, I know it well, they would have wanted me to say: You will not die, I will save you. And it was not because I would have saved him in fact, not because I would have done my job and that I would have done the right thing: send the emergency services. Not because I did what we need to do. They wanted me to say it, at least say it, just say it. But I said, “You will not be saved.”

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 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?

Inspired by this real event, Vincent Delecroix's novel, a work of pure fiction, poses the question of evil and that of collective responsibility, by imagining the portrait of a center operator who, too, may have been shipwrecked that night. Nobody will be saved, and yet literature makes it possible to give a face and a flesh to all the figures of humanity.