Description

‘Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected – a story for our times’ Kevin Barry
‘A work of genius. Eradication is a beautiful and devastating novel’ Luke Kennard
‘A deft, unsettling exploration of what it means to play God’ Maria Reva

A moving fable in which a grieving man, confronts a broken world on an island overpopulated by goats.

Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora and reckon with its invasive population of goats that’s sent the ecological balance severely out of whack..

What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were – and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies – and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.

Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience and the work of a truly singular imagination.

Publisher Review

In Eradication, Jonathan Miles tackles the brutal paradoxes of ecological conservation with both unflinching clarity and comedic flair. When saving an imperilled Eden means eliminating [sacrificing?] one species – whose only crime is to “refuse to stop living”- to protect dozens more, there are no easy answers. A deft, unsettling exploration of what it means to play God — Maria Reva, author of Endling Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected – a story for our times, and all powered by the writer’s tremendous narrative imagination — Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter A work of genius. From the beginning Adi is an endearing castaway of sorts, marooned from his former life, well-employed but hopelessly ill-suited to the grim job at hand. But strangely the best possible witness to his own (our own) role in the natural and unnatural order, whatever that may be. What struck me is the way Miles can pivot seamlessly, symphonically, from a fist-gnawing comedy of errors to a heartbreaking requiem for a habitat, a world, a near-extinct Reed Warbler, a son, resolving into a shocking and defiant denouement. Eradication is a beautiful and devastating novel. — Luke Kennard Miles’s taut, powerful fable pits an everyman against seemingly insurmountable environmental and personal problems. * Shelf Awareness * [Eradication] blew me out of my socks. . . . Short and powerful . . . The second I finished it, I immediately reread it. * Susan Casey, author of Voices in the Ocean *