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Small Boat

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Small Boat

Written by: Vincent Delecroix, Jeremy Harding, Helen Stevenson -translated by
Narrated by: Ethan Reid, Rachel Atkins
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About this listen

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025

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?

A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

©2025 Vincent Delecroix (P)2025 W.F. Howes Ltd. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political World Literature
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Small Boat is a slim book with the emotional density of a storm. Inspired by a real-life migrant tragedy in the English Channel, Delecroix chooses a daring narrative voice, restrained, almost bureaucratic, to explore how moral responsibility dissolves when systems take over. The prose is cool, precise, and unsettling; it refuses sentimentality while forcing the reader to confront uncomfortable questions about complicity, distance, and the cost of indifference in modern Europe. This is not a story that consoles, it interrogates.

On Audible, the impact is arguably sharper. The narration mirrors the book’s clinical tone, creating a chilling contrast with the human suffering beneath the words. The listening experience feels like being trapped inside an official report that slowly reveals its moral vacuum. Short but haunting, Small Boat lingers long after it ends, less as a story and more as an ethical echo. This is literature that whispers, but its silence is deafening.

Chilling

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