The events that inspired the novel’s fictional story happened on the night of November 23, 2021, in the busiest month for small-boat Channel crossings on record at that point. Around 7,000 asylum seekers attempted the crossing that month. The specific dinghy whose fate inspired Small Boat launched from a beach near Dunkirk just after 9:00 pm on November 23, carrying roughly 30 people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam, and Somalia. The boat’s passengers began calling rescue services after midnight. The recorded exchanges between the dinghy and the CROSS station at Cap Gris-Nez became central to the eventual French criminal inquiry. Twenty-seven bodies were recovered the following afternoon. Two passengers survived.

The disaster was part of a larger pattern. Small boats carrying migrants across the English Channel became commonplace around 2018; by late 2024, according to figures cited in Harding’s Introduction, the International Organisation for Migration had recorded around 300 deaths along the corridor, of which at least 80 were drownings (xii). Asylum claim acceptance rates for those who reached the United Kingdom from France ran at roughly 75%. In 2023, a French investigating judge opened a file on five CROSS staff and two crew members of the patrol vessel Flamant on suspicion of failing to assist persons in danger. The narrator of Small Boat is a fictional character inspired by the radio operator on duty that night, and the recordings she and the policewoman listen to in Part 1 are similar to exchanges entered into the police record. Several of the most damning lines that the novel attributes to her, including the suggestion that the migrants will not be saved because they are in English waters, are drawn from the public reporting of the case.