Eradication
A Fable
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island from acclaimed author Jonathan Miles.
“An instant classic.” —The Washington Post
“Excellent . . . A fable within the fable that sharpens and complicates these finely drawn moral dilemmas.”—The New York Times
“Urgent and lyrical.”
—NPR
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 righting an ecological balance that’s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. 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's, 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.
A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude, as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, “a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miles (Anatomy of a Miracle) offers an incisive novel of a melancholy man's ill-fated attempt to make a change in his life and a difference in the world. Adi, a former schoolteacher in an unnamed city, is at loose ends after the death of his young son, Jairo, 11 months earlier and the subsequent collapse of his marriage. Seeking an escape, he finds a job listing from a mysterious foundation to rescue a Pacific island's endangered flora and fauna from an invasive goat population, and lands the gig. Equipped with a rifle, Adi grapples with his mission on the otherwise deserted isle, living in an abandoned seal hunter's hut and making a pet of a carnivorous bird. When he wakes to find seven curious nanny goats on his doorstep, he decides against killing them because it would leave him with "seven carcasses strewn across what was essentially his front sidewalk." Soon, the moral weight of his task begins to take its toll. An excellent storyteller, Miles leavens the gim material with moments of dark comedy and shepherds the plot to a series of poignant revelations about how Jairo died and the true cause of the island's devastation. This one sneaks up on the reader.
