Small Boat

“As icy as the waters of the Channel on a November night.” La Voix du Nord

“The narrator accuses those who judge her of hypocrisy and will only see herself as a cog in the administrative wheel of a France that will not give refuge to the world’s misery. As strong and cruel as the times we live in.”

Paris Match

“The metaphor of drowning reminds us of the extreme indifference which allows all of us to keep our head above water whilst others drown. The drowning in question is not that of twenty-seven lives but of humanity itself.”

Page des libraires

“In Delecroix’s gripping novel, based on a real incident in the Channel in 2021, a troubled coastguard examines her conscience. Was she really complicit in the deaths of 27 migrants at sea during her watch? Perhaps she’s a ‘monster’, yet she’s unwilling to shoulder all the blame. If the drowned are lost, then so are the millions of citizens who deplore the round of migrant deaths they see in the news: ‘There is no shipwreck without spectators … but not one person looks like getting up to step into the water.’ As she struggles to distinguish personal and collective responsibility, she becomes convinced that when the sea claims a migrant boat, it claims us all.”

Jeremy Harding

“A gripping story of an everyday monster that shines its light back on us and on our refusals to face what is happening in our world.”

—Gillian Slovo

“Delecroix’s powerful and timely meditation on this disturbing rhetoric is a damning indictment of apathy in the face of calamity”-Financial Times

“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

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

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

‘It is a work of striking empathy.’ - Monocle

“It took the French writer Vincent Delecroix … less than two years to transform the raw facts of a public scandal into this remarkable tragic fiction. A superb translation by Helen Stevenson beautifully captures the changes in register and the worldplay of the French” - Literary Review

“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

“This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It’s not an easy read – but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it’s an essential story that needs to be told.” - Dua Lipa for Service95 Book Club monthly read

‘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

‘Few works of contemporary literature so sharply focus on moral and political responsibility as Small Boat’- *Race and Class Journal**

“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*

Vincent Delecroix (born 1969 in Paris) is a French philosopher and writer. A graduate from the École normale supérieure, and agrégé of philosophy, he teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Vincent Delecroix received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for his novel Ce qui est perdu (published in 2006) and the Grand prix de littérature de l’Académie française after he published Tombeau d’Achille (in 2008). Small Boat was on the long-list of the 2023 Prix Goncourt. This is the first translation of a novel by Vincent Delecroix in English.

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