The unnamed first-person narrator of Small Boat is a wreck. A radio operator with the French rescue services, she is under investigation for ignoring the calls for help of twenty-nine migrants who came to grief in the Channel. A police inspector plays her recordings of the calls. ‘I didn’t ask you to leave,’ the narrator hears her own voice say to the young man at the other end of the line. But it’s the narrator’s pitiless inner voice that most brutally affects the reader in this short novel. 

During the police interrogation that occupies the first section of the book, the disgraced narrator’s attention skitters off seaward. She would like a word with the drowned. She was not to blame for the circumstances in which they found themselves. She was not the agent of their misfortune: ‘I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat.’  The unreasonable dead haunt her; they hover at the edges of her conscience.

It took the French writer Vincent Delecroix, whose previous works include novels and short stories as well as books on Kierkegaard and Achilles, less than two years to transform the raw facts of a public scandal into this remarkable piece of tragic fiction. A superb translation by Helen Stevenson beautifully