Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. What was your strongest response when you finished the novel, and which scene produced it?

2. Did the narrator’s voice draw you in, push you away, or both at different points?

3. Which of the three parts did you find hardest to read, and why?

4. Were you surprised by how much political, philosophical, and emotional ground the novel covers, given how short it is?

5. What did you think of the ambiguous ending, where the narrator walks into the water and is unable to determine whether she or the caller speaks the words “you will not be saved” (106)?

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Have you ever followed a procedure you knew was inadequate to the situation in front of you, and how did you reason about it afterward?

2. The narrator says empathy is “expressly discouraged” in her work. Have you ever been in a situation in which empathy is either formally or informally discouraged? How did this affect your thoughts or behavior? 

3. How did Léa’s presence in the novel affect your reading of her mother’s choices? Who are the people in your life whom you cling to for comfort in difficult times? 

4. The epigraph from Lucretius describes the pleasure of watching boats in trouble from the safety of shore. Do you recognize that pleasure in any of your own media consumption?

5. Did your sympathy for the narrator shift across the three parts, and what shifted it? Have you ever found yourself questioning your own choices after it’s too late to change them?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. The novel implicates a wider audience of spectators behind the operator at the microphone. Who does that audience include in the book, and who does it include outside of it?

2. What does the novel suggest about the gap between rescue services that exist on paper and rescue that actually arrives?

3. How does the jurisdictional line between French and English waters function in the recordings, and what does it reveal about how borders operate at sea?

4. The young man calls 14 times across the night. What does the novel show about who is heard in such exchanges and who is not?

5. What does Eric’s hostility toward migrants, and the narrator’s choice to leave him over it, contribute to the book’s portrait of the watching public?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. The novel withholds the narrator’s name throughout. What does that withholding do that naming her would not?

2. How does Delecroix use the recordings as a device, and what changes when their phrases reappear later in the narrator’s own mouth on the beach?

3. The interrogation in Part 1 reaches you mostly through the narrator’s replies, with the policewoman’s questions often implied. How did that shape your sense of what was being asked?

4. What effect does the novel achieve by placing Part 2’s drowning sequence between two parts that take place on land?

5. How does the prose handle the moment of death for the young man in the anorak, and what does the choice to end Part 2 on his thought of a grocery store accomplish?

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

1. If the novel were told entirely from the policewoman’s perspective, what would the reader gain and what would they lose?

2. Léa imagines the young man becoming king of a far-off island. What other version of his story would you write for her?

3. If you could add a fourth part to the novel, where and when would you set it, and whose voice would carry it?

4. How would you stage Part 1’s interrogation for film or theatre, given that the two women resemble one another?

5. If you were writing a companion piece set among the cargo ship’s crew the night they swept the water with a searchlight and turned away, what would its first scene be?