Stories about migration in contemporary French literature have proliferated since the 1970s, due to an acceleration in mass migratory flows which were sometimes accompanied by a humanitarian crisis, not unlike the situation Western Europe is responding to today. As migrants seek urgent asylum from war-ridden countries such as Sudan, Afghanistan or Syria, their ability to integrate linguistically or culturally into a new host country factors low in a decision-making process premised foremost on physical safety and bodily refuge. And so the emergence of a literature detailing those horrific experiences of migration across an uninviting sea usually takes another twenty years or more to emerge, once future writers have settled into their host countries and mastered the required linguistic skills to then produce the first waves of a new literary corpus. While we thus await the works that will invariably rise out of today’s migratory flows, it is revealing to reconsider the novels of two of the world’s most significant immigration crises, which culminated in the boat narratives out of Haiti and Vietnam, beginning in the 1990s. Two and three decades after the Duvalier dictatorship and the end of the Vietnam/American War propelled or exiled thousands of refugees on to the Caribbean seas and the Pacific Ocean, French language writers such as Émile Ollivier (Passages, 1991), Néhémey Pierre-Dahomey (Rapatriés, 2017), Linda Lê (Les Évangiles du Crime, 2007) and Kim Thúy (Ru, 2011) have narrativized the experience of migration across perilous waters in ill-equipped vessels, recalling for us a harrowing journey in search of more hospitable lands.