Eradication
On sale
5th February 2026
Price: £14.99
‘Excellent’ New York Times
‘An instant classic. . . Hamlet but with goats everywhere’ Washington Post
‘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.
‘An instant classic. . . Hamlet but with goats everywhere’ Washington Post
‘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.
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Reviews
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
Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected - a story for our times, and all powered by the writer's tremendous narrative imagination
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.
Miles's taut, powerful fable pits an everyman against seemingly insurmountable environmental and personal problems.
[Eradication] blew me out of my socks. . . . Short and powerful . . . The second I finished it, I immediately reread it.
Excellent
Urgent and lyrical
Both dark and funny . . . This is one for the ages
Complex, funny and sad, it is full of big ideas about planet, place and both social and ecological hierarchy. Just brilliant.
Fables are so back . . . The story that follows could be seen as an allegory for corporations playing god with nature, for the treatment of immigrants, or any number of other readings. In fact, you might feel the urge to immediately re-read it. The interplay of the moss, basalt and (remaining) cloud forest of the island with the ugly human instincts which have arrived there is deftly conducted, the meditations on failing to 'save' something hit with real impact and the final pages are just about as satisfying as you can get.