Small Boat Paperback

They would have wanted me to say, I know it well, they would have wanted me to say: You will not die, I will save you. And it was not because I would have saved him in fact, not because I would have done my job and that I would have done the right thing: send the emergency services. Not because I did what we need to do. They wanted me to say it, at least say it, just say it. But I said, “You will not be saved.” In November 2021, the sinking of a migrant boat in the English Channel caused the death of twenty-seven people. Despite their numerous calls for help, the monitoring center did not send the emergency services. Inspired by this real event, Vincent Delecroix's novel, a work of pure fiction, poses the question of evil and that of collective responsibility, by imagining the portrait of a center operator who, too, may have been shipwrecked that night. Nobody will be saved, and yet literature makes it possible to give a face and a flesh to all the figures of humanity. Read more