Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference

There’s a particular kind of story that’s rarely executed well – one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that’s the evil. Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat – a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson – is that kind of story.

Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking – in French, in English, in Kurdish – for help. They didn’t get it.

What is known and not imagined in Delecroix’s pages is that both the French and British coast­­guards received their calls. And both hesitated, passing re­­sponsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction.

The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect.

Delecroix doesn’t give us the migrants’ stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned – not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence.

She listens back to recordings of her own voice on the rescue line, promising help that would not come, offering assurances she did not believe. She is left to reckon with the unbearable fact that someone, somewhere (was it her?) spoke the words: “You will not be saved.”

She isn’t especially monstrous. She’s tired. She’s professional. She has a young daughter at home and an ex-partner who sneers at her work. She runs on the beach to decompress. In one of the novel’s most arresting turns, she compares herself to a mass-produced tin opener: efficient, functional, affectless. Delecroix draws her with enough delicacy that we cannot quite hate her. And that, of course, is far more unsettling.

Reading Small Boat, I thought – as one inevitably does – of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Not evil as grand spectacle or ideology, but as administration, the quiet conviction that one is simply fulfilling a role.

Arendt coined the phrase watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann organised the trains but claimed never to have hated the passengers. What Arendt saw was not a monster but a functionary – and that, of course, was the point.



I thought, too, about my own work as an anthropologist researching forced displacement across Ireland, Turkey and Australia. I’ve sat with people whose lives are shaped not by violence in its cinematic form, but by violence as policy: the hotel room without a kitchen, the letter that never arrives, the bed that’s taken away with no warning.

I’ve heard a senior Irish official describe the state’s provision of housing and support for asylum seekers as “sufficient”. Meanwhile, people, stateless and waiting, are asked to prove their vulnerability again and again until even their grief is suspect.

Institutional indifference

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.