We Came by Sea by Horatio Clare, paperback edition

Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2025

Every day and every night when the sea was calm they came, and most days the newspapers and the websites said the same thing: ‘migrants’ in ‘small boats’ were crossing the English Channel. Rescuers were ‘overwhelmed’, coastal towns were ‘up in arms’. Over and over, the headlines and the photographs told us this story.

But no story has only one side, as Horatio Clare discovered when he began his journeys between Dover and Calais, where he met and listened to the volunteers who help thousands of people every year, from the lifeboat crews mounting operations to the countless unrecognised, uncelebrated British people who are giving their all to help the vulnerable and desperate.

We Came by Sea bears witness to hope and humanity. It is a journey through an unexamined nation – a nation which is every bit as great and good as the people in the dinghies believe it to be. This is not the story that we have been told, but it is a true story.

Praise for We Came by Sea

‘I would read anything Horatio Clare wrote. His prose is always brilliant, and by turns funny, furious and heart-piercingly compassionate. He lights up – no, he scintillates – any subject that finds itself in receipt of the gift of his attention.’  Robert Macfarlane

‘It feels comforting and right to have a writer of Clare’s skill turn attention to this topic, and he does not avoid referencing corruption and other wrongdoing by those in power’ Sally Hayden, The Irish Times

‘[Clare’s] job, executed wonderfully well, is to help us to think calmly and intelligently about those arriving in small boats, to consider giving them a chance and to recognise that we have more in common with them than we might imagine.‘ Maggie Fergusson, The Spectator 

AVAILABLE FOR PRE ORDER. We will send out copies as soon as they arrive from the printers in early December.