Eradication : A Fable

A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning.

“An instant classic.” —The Washington Post • “Excellent ” —The New York Times • “Urgent and lyrical.” —NPR

“Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected — a story for our times.”—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter

Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schoolteacher Adi answers a job listing offering a chance to save the world. The assignment: spend five weeks alone on the tiny Pacific island of Santa Flora, restoring an ecological balance gone dangerously awry by an invasive population of goats. Though he has no experience in wildlife management, he is hired anyway. Armed with little more than survival gear and uneasy resolve, he sets out to remove what doesn’t belong.

But the mission is not what it seems. The threats to the once-Edenic island aren’t what his employers claim. Complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora and by extension, to the world it occupies. As isolation deepens and doubt takes hold, he finds the boundaries between duty and redemption, preservation and harm, growing harder to define.

A desert-island meditation on love, grief, and solitude, as well as a jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an unforgettable reading experience and a bold work of imagination. With this fourth novel, Jonathan Miles, “a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers), delivers his most compelling work yet.

JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not, both New York Times Notable books, and the novel Anatomy of a Miracle. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, where he served as a columnist. In 2024 he toured as a multi-instrumentalist in the band of the Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste. He currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania.