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November 2021: an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen? 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.
Born in Paris, Vincent Delecroix 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. 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 longlist of the 2023 Prix Goncourt and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. It is the first of his novels to be translated into English. Helen Stevenson studied Modern languages at Oxford University, and has been translating literary texts from French to English for 25 years. Her translations include Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou (shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2017), The Missing Piece by Antoine Bello and My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. She is also a writer of novels including Mad Elaine and Love Like Salt; A Memoir. Her English-language translation of Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
Vincent Delecroix, Helen Stevenson (Translator)Add a review
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