The Books & Music That Inspired Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix 

The novel Small Boat  is a haunting meditation on human indifference, moral responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. It’s centred around a tragic real-life event when, in 2021, a boat carrying migrants from France to England sank in the Channel. Through this novel, author Vincent Delecroix reckons with guilt, witness and the limits of compassion in a world too often willing to look away. It’s also Dua’s Monthly Read for July for the Service95 Book Club. 

Blending fiction, philosophy, and sharp political critique, Small Boat  invites us to sit with discomfort, to examine the lives lost at sea not as statistics, but as shattered lives and futures. With searing clarity, Vincent holds up a mirror to Europe’s humanitarian failures – and to our own.

Here, Vincent shares the books and music that informed his writing, and offers a deeper look into the ideas that shaped Small Boat...

The Books That Inspired Small Boat

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Dostoevsky was the main reference for me during the writing of my novel – an unreachable reference! Because nobody but him can build in such a way novels entirely based on moral dilemnas and tortured souls, torments of conscious, dealing with the fragile moving line separating good and evil, humanity and unhumanity; showing the aspiration for holiness and inexorable fall into evil in concrete and even trivial situations, the tigh proximity between buffoonery and sublime and, most of all, the anxious vision of a world given over to evil.”

Shipwreck With Spectator by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Steven Rendall

“A short but dense book of philosophy, whose theme was crucial for the writing of my novel. The book traces the historical and conceptual evolution of a metaphor: the guy standing on the shore who looks at a shipwreck on the ocean in front of him. This metaphor initially designates the precise position of the wise one, who knows how to keep distance from the ocean of passions and the disasters these passions inevitably cause. But now we can see it on the contrary as the indifferent position of a soulless spectator, who doesn’t care at all for the agony of abandoned people. This “wise” position, which is, in fact, an irresponsible and cowardly one, could be the one of the main character of my novel. And it could also be ours...”

Hakim’s Odyssey by Fabien Toulmé, translated by Hannah Chute

“A major graphic novel, if one wants to understand from the inside what it is to bear exile, to escape one’s own country, leaving your life behind; what it is to live a life of a refugee through hopes and despairs, fear, exhaustion; what it is to have to cross so many unknown countries and different worlds.”

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

“Nothing to do with the story my novel is based on, but this magistral novel will haunt you for a very long time, not only because of its darkness and the thrilling evolutive situation it describes, but also for its universal (and frightening!) dimension dealing with culpability – which is one of the major themes of my novel. But, moerover, I find a parallel with what I tried to speak about: not only the innocence of the victim, but the way society or community needs to shape and build scapegoats, and also the inexorable fate, which overpowers almost in mythic terms some people who seem to be designated from the beginning of times to be sacrified.”

Silence Of The Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated by Alison Anderson

“A fantastic novel, almost a tale, by the winner of the French Prix Goncourt 2021, relating in a polyphonic way the life and destiny of a small community of refugees or immigrants in the middle of Sicily. A beautiful, sometimes funny and heartbreaking description of the complex and moving meeting of two worlds, that casts another light on the condition of refugee, or what we call “migrant”, in a dehumanised way of speaking.”

The Playlist To Soundtrack Your Reading Of Small Boat

Scriabin: Vers la flamme (Toward The Flame) by Alexander Scriabin and Vladimir Ashkenazy

“Music is so important to me and, particularly, so closely linked with my writing that, when I began to publish my first novels, I wanted to give the readers the musical references to be listened to during the reading! Here, this particular piece of piano work is based on a hallucinatory crescendo leading to a final explosion and disintegration. Despite the fact that the represented element here is fire, the dynamics of the whole piece corresponds to what I tried to stimulate, a kind of moral panic which goes crescendo.” 

Girl In Amber by Nick Cave 

“I don’t remember if I have ever written any novel without listening to something from Nick Cave! Most of the time, one or the other of his songs, whatever the theme or the story they’re based on, gave me the atmosphere for the writing and obsessively accompanied me during the process. Not only with their melodies or tonalities, but also with images, visions, and hallucinations. Sometimes they even gave me two or three striking sentences, which I duly report in my novel. The content of Girl In Amber has nothing to do with the theme of my novel, but in it I found the atmosphere of the third part of my novel. A quiet but insistent circular movement and the words: “And if you want to bleed, don’t breathe. A word, just step away. And let the world spinning now.” 

The River by PJ Harvey

“Certainly not the most famous song by this magnificent artist, but an unforgettable one for me, which was in my mind while I was writing, as I could see through it something like the slow, vast and endless walk of these people toward the sea, as if they will find their redemption into it. A lyrical, soothing and penetrating voice, a simple melody first based on a piano’s loop, simple words talking about people slowly reaching the water to “leave your pain in the river”.

Clandestino by Manu Chao

“A famous song describing the ghostly condition of illegal immigrants working in the big occidental cities. The whole album, oscillating between melancholy, joy, rage and lightness, evokes in multiple ways, metaphorical or literal, wandering, migrations, clandestinity and exile.”

Small Boat is Dua’s Monthly Read For July – discover Vincent’s full video interview with Dua here, or listen to it with the Service95 Book Club podcast here