Welcome to Novellas in November 2025, in which I try to catch up on reviews by tackling the novellas I’ve read so far this year. 

This novella stuck with me, not only because it is so good, but because my interpretation of it seems to be a rare one, and maybe a wrong one. So, to the extent that a philosophical novel based on true events which I may have interpreted incorrectly can be spoiled, beware of spoilers ahead. 

My theory is that the narrative presented in Small Boat is completely contained in the consciousness of the narrator, a French radio operator who was on duty the night of the November 2021 English Channel disaster. In other words: none of the present-day action described in the book, that is, the narrator’s actions after the disaster and the brief interlude with the migrants, actually happened; it was all in her head. The reader is fully immersed in her mind as she remembers, imagines, worries and spirals about her situation. 

Taking the novella at face value, it’s broken into three parts: Part I is an account of the narrator’s interview with a police investigator shortly after the disaster, part II is an account of the disaster from the point of view of the people aboard the small boat, and part III has the narrator reflecting on the police interview while out for a run. But I’m pretty sure that the narrator imagines the interview, then attempts to empathise with the migrants by imagining what it was like for them, and finally drowns, figuratively and maybe literally, under the contradictions and absurdity of the situation.

After reading, I logged onto various parts of the literary internet, to see what everyone else thought of this approach. But no one is talking about it. Not on Goodreads, not on my favourite book blogs, or Booktube; not in the Booker Prize reading guide, not even in an interview with Delecroix conducted by Dua Lipa. I looked for more formal reviews, even signing up for a trial subscription to the Times Literary Supplement (someone remind me to cancel!), and nada. Even the introduction to the English edition, by Jeremy Harding, takes the narrative literally. Am I completely out to lunch?

There’s plenty of evidence that the police interview in Part I is completely imaginary. I see this as the narrator rehearsing arguments for when she eventually does get interviewed by the police, but in reality, she’s talking to herself in a mirror. Why else would the police investigator look just like her?

“The policewoman wore her hair tied back severely in a pony tail, exactly like me, I thought, and sat up straight like me, a bit like a soldier, with coat-rack shoulders as Eric used to say…”

“I felt I was looking at myself, and consequently as though I was questioning myself, as though I was looking at myself in in a mirror and saying to myself…”

The narrator also remarks on how the police inspector doesn’t talk like a police inspector should, and asks questions that the police wouldn’t ask. She even wonders at one point if “she might be trying to play the role of my conscience” and has an “impression” that she is “summoning myself to the weighing-up of souls”. 

Apart from the police woman in the mirror, the narrator keeps dissociating and imagining scenarios during the interview. Almost like we’re just following the threads of her consciousness. Before the interview begins, the narrator stops for a coffee, and starts to have troubling thoughts:

“An insipid coffee, on the surface of which I saw little dinghies bobbing about…”

And during the interview, more intrusive thoughts come to the surface: 

“It seemed to me that the sea, incomprehensibly, has begun to encroach on the building site opposite the police station window, so that soon the living Africans would also have their feet in the water and be calling for help.”

“At best, what I saw was the bodies floating on her desk, still, which she pushed away every now and then with her hand.”

And this brilliant little passage, which is exactly what it’s like to have different threads of thought bouncing around in your mind, and suggests very strongly that we as readers are stuck in someone’s mind:

“As though…this reality – people drowning – was just a game, as though I’d watched it as you might watch floods in Pakistan on the TV, while preparing the evening meal. And also as though, now that I was sitting in her office at the police station, mostly preoccupied with watching workmen on the building site opposite and the gulls over the beach where I go running, I was still submerged in the absentmindedness and that, whatever I might say to the contrary, I still hadn’t realised, I still hadn’t really grasped the reality of the situation.”* 

There’s not much direct evidence that Part II, in which the migrants embark, sink, and drown, is the imaginings of the narrator. But hear me out: she’s spent the last 77 pages arguing (with herself) about whether she is a monster who can’t empathise with a migrant. So she says (to herself): oh yeah? Watch me. In fact, this section has to be imagined by someone, as no one could know the inner thoughts of a young man drowning:

“He felt a hand trying to hold him back. He thought, When I get to England I will work in a grocery store. A grocery store, he repeated to himself.”

In Part III, the narrator reflects on the “interview” while giving us even more evidence that  it wasn’t real. It’s pretty direct here, on page 103: 

“And I had to admit that it wasn’t her saying all this, but me, and a gust of wind suddenly blew open the window of the police station onto what was quite clearly not a street with, on the far side, a construction site busy with workers, but simply the sea.”

And later, I had forgotten, she very directly tells us that she “could” hand herself into the coastguard office, and “would” hear her voice recordings from the night of the disaster – not that she did these things, but only considering it. 

The very end reads more like a break with reality. Is it possible that she really encounters the two surviving migrants on the beach near her home? I guess –  or it represents her guilt, or her inability to resolve her inner experience with the outside world’s reaction. Either way, she (literally or figuratively) walks into the sea to make her swirling thoughts stop.

So I’m not sure – is the fact that this narrative takes place in thoughts, not in reality, so obvious that no one’s remarking on it? I loved this approach, but find most people talk about the police interview very matter-of-factly, as if it was a real thing that happened.

In preparing to write this review, I finally found a couple of people who read Small Boat the way I did. Sadhika of Read Around the World says that Part III “makes us question if the interrogation was even real or simply a conversation that took place in [the narrator’s] head.” I found a Goodreads review by Rachel of Rachelsradreads, after much scrolling, that also references Part III and how it “makes the reader question whether the first section occurred in reality or was an imagined interrogation.” 

To me, there is no question at all! Small Boat is a stream of consciousness, and a very effective one at that. Stream of consciousness doesn’t always mean long sentences or lack of punctuation or repeated phrases like “the fact that.” Here, it means imagined conversations bleeding into memories and intrusive thoughts.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m focused on the wrong thing entirely. Maybe I’m making this all about me, like the narrator does. Read it however you want, this is a deep and troubling book. I read it for a second time, closely and in its entirety, before writing this interview, and could do it again, and bring up an entirely different angle, like how the narrator’s colleague Julien is an author self-insert, or how Small Boat picks up on the themes in Camus’ The Stranger. All this packed into 122 pages makes this a Novellas in November classic.