Small Boat is a beautifully written horrifying depiction of guilt, morality, and complicity: who is responsible when a sinking dinghy filled with migrants slips under the dark sea? 

The rescue center staff monitoring the English Channel sloshing with fishing trawlers, container ships, private yachts and loads of inflatable dinghies? The smugglers who overload decrepit boats with desperate people? The migrants themselves who choose to leave their home? The governments that drive people–their own or others–to flee danger and degradation for hope somewhere else? All of us who believe we’ll step in and help, even though we really don’t know what we’d do or sacrifice for someone else to have a better life? 

This is an emotionally draining, compelling fictional novella based on a factual news story from November 2021 when 27 migrants drowned in the English Channel, drifting at the border of French and British waters and thus, between French and British rescue operators. 

Written in three parts, we enter an internal monologue of the French operator on duty as she wrestles with her guilt or innocence; then we relive the few hours of terror and sinking on the dinghy; then more reflection of her job and the sea. At just over 100 pages, the story covers only a few hours, much of it in stream of consciousness self analysis. Like we’re drowning in the narrator’s emotions, words, and self-defense as the migrants drown in icy, black water.  

She hears their voices in her daughter’s cries, sees their bodies floating in her daughter’s soup, wonders when the sinking starts because so many who drown in the Mediterranean or the Channel “were sunk long before they sank.” The power and harm of the sea mirror the  lack of power and harm in their lives. 

Her job is to save them and also to know that some will not be saved. 

This tiny book is intense. 4.5 ⭐️

Shortlisted for the 2025 International