First published 2025
The emergency dispatcher sits at her console as desperate voices crackle through her headset. Twenty nine migrants are drowning in the Channel between France and Britain, their inflatable boat taking on water in November 2021. She tells the callers they are in British waters and must contact British authorities for rescue. By the time help arrives, twenty seven people have died. Now she faces accusations that she failed in her duty. She refuses to accept sole responsibility for the tragedy. Why should she bear more blame than the sea that swallowed them, the wars that drove them from home, or the crises that set this disaster in motion? Vincent Delecroix places readers inside the mind of a woman caught between bureaucracy and human catastrophe, forced to defend choices made in moments when lives hung in the balance.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, crime, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: moral-dilemma, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Britain, Channel, France
Period: 2021
122 pages · Paperback · HopeRoad
Content warnings: death, graphic-violence