What do you think?
Rate this book
Eradication: A Fable
From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles (“a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"—
LA Times
) comes a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island.
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The 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.
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The 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.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published February 10, 2026
112 people are currently reading
5320 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Miles
5 books168 followersJONATHAN 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: The True* Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace, which was a featured selection for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central and is currently in development as a feature film.
Dear American Airlines was named a Best Book of 2008 by the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Amazon.com, and others. It was also a finalist for the QPB New Voices Award, the Borders Original Voices Award, and the Great Lakes Book Award, and has been translated into six languages.
Want Not was named a best book of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, bookish.com, bookriot.com, and litReactor.com, and was a finalist for the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award in Fiction.
He is a former columnist for the New York Times and has been a contributing editor to a wide range of national magazines including Garden & Gun, where he has served as Books columnist since 2012. His journalism has been included numerous times in the annual Best American Crime Writing and Best American Sports writing anthologies, including his account of competing in the 2005 Dakar Rally, a 5,500-mile race through north Africa.
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.
Dear American Airlines was named a Best Book of 2008 by the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Amazon.com, and others. It was also a finalist for the QPB New Voices Award, the Borders Original Voices Award, and the Great Lakes Book Award, and has been translated into six languages.
Want Not was named a best book of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, bookish.com, bookriot.com, and litReactor.com, and was a finalist for the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award in Fiction.
He is a former columnist for the New York Times and has been a contributing editor to a wide range of national magazines including Garden & Gun, where he has served as Books columnist since 2012. His journalism has been included numerous times in the annual Best American Crime Writing and Best American Sports writing anthologies, including his account of competing in the 2005 Dakar Rally, a 5,500-mile race through north Africa.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
February 15, 2026
Claire Keegan, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Sigrid Nunez, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have all written breathtakingly brilliant short novels. Add to that list Jonathan Miles with his new book, ERADICATION. As an animal lover, I read this tale enrapt; as someone who loves a sly sense of humor in a book, I found myself nodding and smiling; and as a reader who devours dread in a book with the same urgency I do chocolate (and I really love chocolate), I was left blissful and sated. The bare bones of the story are this: a young father (Adi) grieving for the loss of his son, his marriage obliterated by the child's sudden death, leaves the school where he teaches to take on a new task. Suddenly, he's a man (seemingly) alone on an island, with five weeks' provisions, one rifle, and a lot of ammunition. There are 4,000 goats on the island and. . .he's not a hunter. Or a killer. But the goats are an invasive species and don't belong, and they are driving the island's natural flora and fauna into extinction, and. . .and. . .and you see Adi's horrifying dilemma. Do not be scared of this book, my animal loving friends. Follow Adi to the island and join him as your heart rises and falls with him. . .and the goats. This short novel is a treasure.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Adi has lot everything. His son is dead and his wife has left him. He needs something so when a job opportunity to "save the world" arises, he sees his chance for some redemption.
He is deposited on the goat-infested Island of Santa Flora with enough provisions to survive and enough ammunition to save the island's rare flora and fauna from the non-indigenous, hungry goats who have demolished so much of the island's resources.
However Adi has not reckoned with having to actually find and kill the goats or the fishermen who are doing their own bit for denuding the ocean.
Eradication is a beautifully crafted short novel about one man's struggle to come to terms with what his life has become and who he really is.
Great writing and a surprising story. I did get a bit frustrated with Adi at times but he is a likeable character. I would highly recommend this short read.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Quercus Books for the advance review copy.
He is deposited on the goat-infested Island of Santa Flora with enough provisions to survive and enough ammunition to save the island's rare flora and fauna from the non-indigenous, hungry goats who have demolished so much of the island's resources.
However Adi has not reckoned with having to actually find and kill the goats or the fishermen who are doing their own bit for denuding the ocean.
Eradication is a beautifully crafted short novel about one man's struggle to come to terms with what his life has become and who he really is.
Great writing and a surprising story. I did get a bit frustrated with Adi at times but he is a likeable character. I would highly recommend this short read.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Quercus Books for the advance review copy.
December 16, 2025
My early Shelf Awareness review: Who wouldn't take a job that involves "saving the world"? Adi, the antihero of Jonathan Miles's powerful fourth novel, is drawn to the job listing not just for the noble mission but also for the chance to be alone for five weeks on a Pacific island. A teacher reeling from his 11-year-old son Jairo's death and his wife leaving, Adi relishes getting away from it all. But he hasn't reckoned with the emotional challenge of eradicating an invasive species--and facing up to humanity's role in environmental crises.
Santa Flora once teemed with endemic birds and reptiles, but many species have gone extinct because of the ballooning population of goats. Whalers left a few on the island as food supplies to retrieve on the way back from expeditions, but the numbers have gotten out of hand since. The goats strip the cliffs of flora and compete with native fauna for habitat. A flashback to Adi's cursory interview reveals that he was completely unqualified, having never fired a gun, but the mysterious "foundation" was so desperate it hired him anyway. Armed with a sniper's rifle, his task is to kill all of the island's estimated 2,000 to 4,000 goats.
From the start, it's clear Adi's not cut out for this. The story nears the midpoint when he finally kills his first goat. He butchers it, but cries while eating the meat. In the meantime, he's made the mistake of becoming emotionally attached to the female goats hanging around his hut. He's identified individuals and named them; how can he kill them? As the likelihood of success plummets, he chooses a new tactic: slaughter all the males to halt reproduction.
Miles spins a taut parable reminiscent of T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done. The setting is imprecise and the backstory sparse, as befits a fable. Adi's relationship with his son and jazz clarinet hobby are resonant. His island discoveries enhance a nuanced environmentalist message: a trash-covered beach; an injured bird thought to be extinct--embodying why the goats can't coexist with endangered species; and two drunken fishermen who illegally kill sharks and sell the fins to China. Guilt and blame, responsibility and revenge, trade off in this troubling novella. Attempts at rectification keep backfiring. Human tragedies, like Jairo's accidental death, may be random. Those that befall the natural world, though--whether intentional or not--can only be laid at humanity's door.
(Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.) (3.5)
Santa Flora once teemed with endemic birds and reptiles, but many species have gone extinct because of the ballooning population of goats. Whalers left a few on the island as food supplies to retrieve on the way back from expeditions, but the numbers have gotten out of hand since. The goats strip the cliffs of flora and compete with native fauna for habitat. A flashback to Adi's cursory interview reveals that he was completely unqualified, having never fired a gun, but the mysterious "foundation" was so desperate it hired him anyway. Armed with a sniper's rifle, his task is to kill all of the island's estimated 2,000 to 4,000 goats.
From the start, it's clear Adi's not cut out for this. The story nears the midpoint when he finally kills his first goat. He butchers it, but cries while eating the meat. In the meantime, he's made the mistake of becoming emotionally attached to the female goats hanging around his hut. He's identified individuals and named them; how can he kill them? As the likelihood of success plummets, he chooses a new tactic: slaughter all the males to halt reproduction.
Miles spins a taut parable reminiscent of T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done. The setting is imprecise and the backstory sparse, as befits a fable. Adi's relationship with his son and jazz clarinet hobby are resonant. His island discoveries enhance a nuanced environmentalist message: a trash-covered beach; an injured bird thought to be extinct--embodying why the goats can't coexist with endangered species; and two drunken fishermen who illegally kill sharks and sell the fins to China. Guilt and blame, responsibility and revenge, trade off in this troubling novella. Attempts at rectification keep backfiring. Human tragedies, like Jairo's accidental death, may be random. Those that befall the natural world, though--whether intentional or not--can only be laid at humanity's door.
(Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.) (3.5)
October 11, 2025
By far the best ARC I’ve read to date, this book felt like finding a small, unexpected slice of perfection. Eradication: A Fable is a mesmerizing exploration of isolation, nature, morality, and the tangled ways our past mistakes shape us. This was my first experience reading Jonathan Miles, and I can confidently say I’ll be a repeater. His prose is absolutely spellbinding: lush, reflective, and razor-sharp in its observations of both humanity and the natural world.
The story carries the introspective solitude of The Wall and the eerie, windswept atmosphere of Wild Dark Shore. Through Adi, we’re invited into a deeply personal, almost spiritual journey of reckoning and renewal. His decision to isolate himself on an island raises haunting questions: Did he come here for the good of the island, or for himself? Does his understanding of life, guilt, and purpose evolve by the end? I found myself rooting for him the entire way, drawn into the beauty and unease of his surroundings and the fragile life of the island’s goats that come to symbolize so much more.
This book was also incredibly unique and kept me wanting more with every chapter. I loved the vivid idea of thousands of goats roaming the island—both haunting and strangely beautiful. At first, it seems simple: remove what’s invasive. But as Adi names and knows these creatures, the lines blur. Who truly belongs? Do humans ever bring balance to nature, or only harm? Can we change?
This novel made me pause and look inward, challenging my own beliefs about goodness, forgiveness, and the quiet ways we can make peace with the past. Eradication: A Fable is timely, profound, and achingly human—a story that reminds us to stand firm in what’s right, to listen to the earth, and to always try to do better.
A stunning and unforgettable read I’ll be recommending to absolutely everyone!
Huge thanks to @NetGalley and the publisher for letting me discover this beautiful, thought-provoking story early—it was truly a gift to read. I can’t wait to talk about this more after publishing date of 2.10.26!
The story carries the introspective solitude of The Wall and the eerie, windswept atmosphere of Wild Dark Shore. Through Adi, we’re invited into a deeply personal, almost spiritual journey of reckoning and renewal. His decision to isolate himself on an island raises haunting questions: Did he come here for the good of the island, or for himself? Does his understanding of life, guilt, and purpose evolve by the end? I found myself rooting for him the entire way, drawn into the beauty and unease of his surroundings and the fragile life of the island’s goats that come to symbolize so much more.
This book was also incredibly unique and kept me wanting more with every chapter. I loved the vivid idea of thousands of goats roaming the island—both haunting and strangely beautiful. At first, it seems simple: remove what’s invasive. But as Adi names and knows these creatures, the lines blur. Who truly belongs? Do humans ever bring balance to nature, or only harm? Can we change?
This novel made me pause and look inward, challenging my own beliefs about goodness, forgiveness, and the quiet ways we can make peace with the past. Eradication: A Fable is timely, profound, and achingly human—a story that reminds us to stand firm in what’s right, to listen to the earth, and to always try to do better.
A stunning and unforgettable read I’ll be recommending to absolutely everyone!
Huge thanks to @NetGalley and the publisher for letting me discover this beautiful, thought-provoking story early—it was truly a gift to read. I can’t wait to talk about this more after publishing date of 2.10.26!
February 14, 2026
Incredibly disappointing book. I read the blurb and the reviews which set up the book well but I found it fell far short of expectations.
Spoilers ahead, although it felt so predictable I am not too worried about spoiling it - I think it is quite clear what will happen.
This book is 168 pages of a man accepting a job to cull goats to protect an island ecosystem, then proceeding to whine about it and to fail to attempt it with any seriousness. When he does occasionally kill or wound a goat he feels so guilty afterwards he goes on about it for pages and pages. What is truly frustrating is that he does not choose a lane - he continually hunts goats but then is unable to pull the trigger. If he felt so bad after killing the first goat why not simply down tools and enjoy island paradise for the rest of his contract? Instead we are treated to the joys of being stuck with the most annoying man in the world as he stalks goats only to go home without doing his job.
Like any book on a deserted Edenic island the threat comes from other people who are breaking the law (think the armed weed militia in “The Beach”). Here the main character drinks with some men who illegally hunt sharks in the area before shooting them at the end - deciding they’re the real threat to the island not the goats, despite all the evidence of how the goats had deforested the island.
It felt like a massively missed opportunity- the blurb had hinted that there was mystery about how the foundation could be lying about what was happening on the island, but that went nowhere, leading to there being a hope of mystery which only became more disappointing as one realised the book was near its very short run without developing any threads of mystery.
As a tale of conservation it was shallow and trite; the illegal shark hunters do it because they’re sadistic junkies and they find killing fun. Main character decides that the goats aren’t the issue because they just live there man. He decides “nature doesn’t give a fuck” when the bird he had failed to feed for days gets eaten by a rat due to him not putting the lid on bird’s enclosure properly.
Some reviews claimed this book was a nuanced character study, but every character felt so cliched I feel truly misled.
Bitterly disappointed- I don’t often try random newly written books on a whim, but the reviews and the setting made it sound like this book was right up my alley. Instead I got a book full of self-fellatious characters and goats (literally for some reason there is a goat going to town on itself, which the main character is more than happy to shoot).
Seriously this book has nothing to offer on either: characters (all of which feel like tropes); conservation (where the points it makes are so elementary and poorly developed it feels like discussing the issue of protecting ecosystems with a toddler); Mystery (there is none, despite the blurb and the unnamed, shady foundation); or even nature writing (I didn’t find the writing particularly enjoyable - on discovering a remnant of cloud forest: “the farther down adi hiked […] the greener and mistier it appeared.” “The wet leafy cloak that’d once draped the entirety of Santa flora” - really?!!?).
Trash book, makes me doubt the judgement of people who have given it good reviews. Would like to hear about why people enjoyed it because I’m genuinely baffled as to how this was enjoyable.
Spoilers ahead, although it felt so predictable I am not too worried about spoiling it - I think it is quite clear what will happen.
This book is 168 pages of a man accepting a job to cull goats to protect an island ecosystem, then proceeding to whine about it and to fail to attempt it with any seriousness. When he does occasionally kill or wound a goat he feels so guilty afterwards he goes on about it for pages and pages. What is truly frustrating is that he does not choose a lane - he continually hunts goats but then is unable to pull the trigger. If he felt so bad after killing the first goat why not simply down tools and enjoy island paradise for the rest of his contract? Instead we are treated to the joys of being stuck with the most annoying man in the world as he stalks goats only to go home without doing his job.
Like any book on a deserted Edenic island the threat comes from other people who are breaking the law (think the armed weed militia in “The Beach”). Here the main character drinks with some men who illegally hunt sharks in the area before shooting them at the end - deciding they’re the real threat to the island not the goats, despite all the evidence of how the goats had deforested the island.
It felt like a massively missed opportunity- the blurb had hinted that there was mystery about how the foundation could be lying about what was happening on the island, but that went nowhere, leading to there being a hope of mystery which only became more disappointing as one realised the book was near its very short run without developing any threads of mystery.
As a tale of conservation it was shallow and trite; the illegal shark hunters do it because they’re sadistic junkies and they find killing fun. Main character decides that the goats aren’t the issue because they just live there man. He decides “nature doesn’t give a fuck” when the bird he had failed to feed for days gets eaten by a rat due to him not putting the lid on bird’s enclosure properly.
Some reviews claimed this book was a nuanced character study, but every character felt so cliched I feel truly misled.
Bitterly disappointed- I don’t often try random newly written books on a whim, but the reviews and the setting made it sound like this book was right up my alley. Instead I got a book full of self-fellatious characters and goats (literally for some reason there is a goat going to town on itself, which the main character is more than happy to shoot).
Seriously this book has nothing to offer on either: characters (all of which feel like tropes); conservation (where the points it makes are so elementary and poorly developed it feels like discussing the issue of protecting ecosystems with a toddler); Mystery (there is none, despite the blurb and the unnamed, shady foundation); or even nature writing (I didn’t find the writing particularly enjoyable - on discovering a remnant of cloud forest: “the farther down adi hiked […] the greener and mistier it appeared.” “The wet leafy cloak that’d once draped the entirety of Santa flora” - really?!!?).
Trash book, makes me doubt the judgement of people who have given it good reviews. Would like to hear about why people enjoyed it because I’m genuinely baffled as to how this was enjoyable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A random little book.
Eradication follows Adi who takes up a job on a remote Central Pacific island which has been overrun by goats. His job is to spend five weeks killing as many of them as he can, so that the wildlife there on the brink of extinction, can flourish again. But Adi has never shot a gun before, and it's soon clear he took up this job after suffering a terrible personal tragedy - the death of his son. Haunted by his memories, he also begins to suspect that the goats aren't the problem after all, which is just as well because he's clearly not built for killing.
This has already received rave reviews from many readers so I am clearly in a slight minority here, but I just wanted a bit more from Eradication. The humour was welcome but the writing was a little plain for me and the flashbacks were underwhelming, not really doing much to build Adi's character.
It's an easy, fine read, just not one that is going to make my top books of the year. I will say if you don't like books that feature animal cruelty, don't read this. I found some scenes very upsetting! Cracking ending though.
Eradication follows Adi who takes up a job on a remote Central Pacific island which has been overrun by goats. His job is to spend five weeks killing as many of them as he can, so that the wildlife there on the brink of extinction, can flourish again. But Adi has never shot a gun before, and it's soon clear he took up this job after suffering a terrible personal tragedy - the death of his son. Haunted by his memories, he also begins to suspect that the goats aren't the problem after all, which is just as well because he's clearly not built for killing.
This has already received rave reviews from many readers so I am clearly in a slight minority here, but I just wanted a bit more from Eradication. The humour was welcome but the writing was a little plain for me and the flashbacks were underwhelming, not really doing much to build Adi's character.
It's an easy, fine read, just not one that is going to make my top books of the year. I will say if you don't like books that feature animal cruelty, don't read this. I found some scenes very upsetting! Cracking ending though.
February 15, 2026
4/5 stars
“Nature doesn’t give a fuck.”
Eradication is an apt eco-novella with a strong undercurrent of grief and morality, both personal and with regard to the larger world around us.
We follow Adi, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher, as he accepts a curious “eco-conservation” job on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora. Here, armed with nothing but survival gear and a gun, he’s tasked to reckon with its invasive population of goats that's sent the ecological balance severely out of whack…
Eradication takes full advantage of the ridiculous irony of the task; to eradicate a species to “protect nature”… Adi’s time on the island is filled with stark contradictions, at times scathing, at times hilarious. Isolated, yet surrounded by the teeming life of the island flora- and fauna, Adi goes back and forth on the morality of his job as a “killer”. In this light, he is also forced to confront a deep personal grief he’s been trying to outrun, following the violent death of his son. This added layer of grief and the teetering balance between bitterness towards the world and tentative hopefulness towards its beauty, elevate what might otherwise have been a simplistic eco-tale to a new level. What will win out in the end? Is nature beautiful or cruel? Is it worth protecting, or is Adi justified in lashing out in anger towards it?
This is an easy recommendation for fans of climate-fiction with a satirical undertone, anti-hero protagonists, and goats alike. Fair warning though; considering the job Adi’s set out to do, there’s the obvious violence against animals and people to contend with.
Many thanks to Quercus Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
“Nature doesn’t give a fuck.”
Eradication is an apt eco-novella with a strong undercurrent of grief and morality, both personal and with regard to the larger world around us.
We follow Adi, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher, as he accepts a curious “eco-conservation” job on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora. Here, armed with nothing but survival gear and a gun, he’s tasked to reckon with its invasive population of goats that's sent the ecological balance severely out of whack…
Eradication takes full advantage of the ridiculous irony of the task; to eradicate a species to “protect nature”… Adi’s time on the island is filled with stark contradictions, at times scathing, at times hilarious. Isolated, yet surrounded by the teeming life of the island flora- and fauna, Adi goes back and forth on the morality of his job as a “killer”. In this light, he is also forced to confront a deep personal grief he’s been trying to outrun, following the violent death of his son. This added layer of grief and the teetering balance between bitterness towards the world and tentative hopefulness towards its beauty, elevate what might otherwise have been a simplistic eco-tale to a new level. What will win out in the end? Is nature beautiful or cruel? Is it worth protecting, or is Adi justified in lashing out in anger towards it?
This is an easy recommendation for fans of climate-fiction with a satirical undertone, anti-hero protagonists, and goats alike. Fair warning though; considering the job Adi’s set out to do, there’s the obvious violence against animals and people to contend with.
Many thanks to Quercus Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
November 11, 2025
READ. THIS. BOOK!! it’s a short novel of only 158 pages but such a great story. While it is built around “goats”that need to be removed from an island because they are destroying nature there, it is truly only a personification of what has happened in Adi’s life. Adi takes a 5 week job on an island called Santa Flora. His mission is to remove the goats that someone brought to the island but have over populated the island and it’s leading to its destruction. What happens when Adi gets there is the heart of this story. Magnificent. Trust me when I say it will open your eyes. 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
January 14, 2026
4.5 stars ⭐️ haunting and deceptively layered; I’ll be thinking about this fable, and it’s many possible iterations, for a while.
October 2, 2025
Give me a second to formulate a review. I’m still thinking about this book, it’s haunting me…IN A GOOD WAY! Adi’s backstory unfolds throughout the course of the book, which leads to a “BANG” of an ending.
February 15, 2026
I didn't want this story to end...........I thought the storytelling amazing, placed me right there on that island.....made me care. Thank you Johnathan, I found out about this book from you reading excerpts of it on NPR.
February 16, 2026
I know it was important to the story but I REALLY could have done without the shark scene. A sad, dark little fable with only a glimmer of light at the end.
March 3, 2026
It was well written, but I wanted more to it. And less of that shark scene. Goodness.
March 7, 2026
Thanks to Doubleday for the gifted copy. All opinions below are my own.
Adi has gone through some personal traumas. He decides to accept a job on a remote island to "save the world." He quickly learns that the job is not what he thought but he goes anyway. Living in a little hut with very little he begins to face his demons as well as the threats on the island.
I liked the introspective tone of this novel. I also love the survival aspects. It reminded me of Castaway in the best ways. What develops on the island and how it ends was a bit of a surprise. I think I would have preferred just Adi and the goats but I get why the author brought things together the way they did.
Adi has gone through some personal traumas. He decides to accept a job on a remote island to "save the world." He quickly learns that the job is not what he thought but he goes anyway. Living in a little hut with very little he begins to face his demons as well as the threats on the island.
I liked the introspective tone of this novel. I also love the survival aspects. It reminded me of Castaway in the best ways. What develops on the island and how it ends was a bit of a surprise. I think I would have preferred just Adi and the goats but I get why the author brought things together the way they did.
February 8, 2026
Oof, that ending! All the heartstrings were pulled.
January 30, 2026
eradication is a brilliant fable about conservation, the natural world, and the wielding of biopower—particularly the impossible bind which it has placed us in. miles does an incredible job of illustrating the ethical dilemmas which those of us who are invested in protecting the environment must navigate. how can we speak about invasive species when it is humans who are the most invasive of all? humans who have fundamentally disrupted all ecosystems, who have created the conditions wherein another animal may be deemed a pest, who pick and choose which ecosystems ought to be protected specifically to avoid addressing and changing our own ways of life. these are questions i think about constantly in my life, ones which i have rarely seen tackled in a piece of fiction, and i think that eradication navigates the hypocrisies and tensions of modern conservation phenomenally.
February 6, 2026
beautiful writing, not an enjoyable story to me but incredibly interesting. at its core, the story really is asking the reader this: in the wake of grief, do you become who your true nature is or do you stay who you have been nurtured to be?
Ty to netgalley for the arc!
Ty to netgalley for the arc!
February 15, 2026
My goodness, Reminiscent of the chilling short stories we all remember from school, eradication will leave you shaken and thinking for weeks. I cannot come up with the words for this book. An instant classic.
March 2, 2026
Clearly, this is not my genre and time I can’t get back. Would have given one star, but it was well written.
February 23, 2026
A pretty interesting read, it tackles the issues of caring for the world and what the real problems are. It reminded me of a few other classic novels which revolve around being alone on an island which was pretty fun I just don’t know if I loved all of it.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
A Conservation Mission Turns Into a Moral Trap: Jonathan Miles’s “Eradication” and the Cost of Necessary Violence
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 9th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Jonathan Miles’s “Eradication” begins with a proposition that looks, at first glance, almost administratively pure: a damaged ecosystem, an invasive species, a contracted human instrument tasked with removal. It’s the kind of story our era produces instinctively, because it matches the way we’ve learned to speak about crisis – identify the problem, assign a fix, measure outcomes, deliver impact. But Miles is too shrewd, and too alive to the mess of actual lived consequences, to let the premise stay clean for long. What “Eradication” becomes, instead, is a novel about the moral fraudulence of cleanliness itself: the way tidy frameworks – even well-intended ones – collapse the moment a body must enact them.
Adi, the man hired to kill goats on a remote Pacific island called Santa Flora, is not a professional hunter. He is a former schoolteacher and clarinetist, a widower in everything but paperwork, a father after fatherhood has been stripped from him. His son, Jairo, is dead. His marriage has imploded in the wake of that death. The capital has become a geography of avoidance: acquaintances who make sudden U-turns in grocery aisles, colleagues who escape meetings early, the social choreography that surrounds grief like a quarantine line. Santa Flora, then, is not just a conservation assignment. It is exile with an expense report. It is a sanctioned way to disappear.
Miles makes the island tactile before he makes it symbolic. Santa Flora is a comma of land with an unforgiving spine: volcanic ridges, loose tuff cobbles, wet basalt snarls, cruel climbs that turn “as-the-bird-flies” distance into an ordeal. The physical exertion matters because “Eradication” is a novel about moral exertion. Adi’s body is constantly negotiating steepness, friction, exhaustion, and the text quietly suggests that ethics, too, is a terrain – not a principle you hold, but a series of footholds you either find or fail to find under pressure.
The assignment is straightforward in the way the most troubling modern assignments often are. A multinational nonprofit foundation has hired Adi for five weeks to eliminate Santa Flora’s feral goats, an introduced species that has stripped the island of vegetation and threatens endemic birds, reptiles, plants – the whole trembling lattice we’ve learned to call “biodiversity” as if it were a portfolio. Adi arrives with gear, rations, a rifle, and the foundation’s voice already installed in his head: the job is saving a unique ecosystem; the job is preventing extinctions; the job is removing a malignant growth. In our moment, this is familiar language: urgency as ethics, ethics as mandate, mandate as absolution.
But the goats, on the ground, are not malignant growth. They are goats – living, blinking, chewing, stubbornly ordinary. They gather in small segregated groups, nannies here, billies there, the way children sort themselves on a playground. They don’t behave like cinematic prey. They don’t even always behave like they’ve read the headlines about humankind’s danger. Sometimes they simply watch Adi approach, craning their necks as if curious about the strange upright animal crossing their slopes. This is one of the novel’s quiet provocations: it refuses to make the “enemy” narratively convenient.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Adi’s first attempt at moral optimization arrives early, and it’s both funny and revealing. He decides he doesn’t need to kill all the goats. Only the males, he thinks. Without billies, there are no kids; the nanny goats can live out their days until they vanish “quietly.” It’s an elegant managerial solution, halving the labor while preserving the sensation of mercy, and Adi indulges a rare flash of pride. Miles lets us feel the seduction of that pride – the modern faith that if you reframe the problem correctly, ethics becomes efficient.
Santa Flora immediately begins unraveling his efficiencies. The island contains E3, a Santa Flora reed warbler, injured and possibly the last of its kind. The bird is both companion and indictment, a living receipt for the foundation’s claims. Adi must not only kill, he must keep alive one fragile proof of why killing is happening. E3 complicates everything because it refuses metaphor. It needs fresh meat, not canned substitutes, not sun-dried scraps. The bird’s pickiness is not personality; it is ecology. Nature is specific. It does not accept your intentions as nutrition.
As Adi scouts the island – what he tells himself is reconnaissance, a reprieve from wholesale shooting – Miles expands Santa Flora into a moral laboratory. Adi discovers a misted, green pocket of cloud forest, a remnant sanctuary where fog condenses on leaves, where water pools like beads, where the island briefly reveals what it might have been before goats ate its living infrastructure. The scene is written with a lushness that risks romanticizing restoration, and then Miles counters it with the blunt knowledge that restoration often requires violence. The cloud forest is an “oyster disclosing a pearl,” yes – and it is also the justification for bullets.
Then come the humans who make the novel’s ethical pressure turn nearly unbearable. At Santa Flora’s far anchorage, Campo Langosta, Adi is intercepted at night by two shirtless fishermen – Mundo and Chuky – who greet him with a spotlight and a pistol and a shouted question that seems, at first, absurd: Are you government? Adi keeps insisting no, flailing to explain the difference between state and nonprofit, until the only sentence that makes sense in the fishermen’s world is the simplest one: he is here to shoot goats. Their reaction is laughter. Not because it’s harmless, but because it’s insane – because in their economy, killing is either survival or crime, not salaried conservation.
Mundo and Chuky are illegal shark finners, and Miles draws them with the kind of vivid specificity that prevents easy dismissal. Mundo is lean and slot-mouthed, tattooed with sea creatures like a moving atlas of the ocean: moray, octopus, jellyfish, manta ray, tiger shark. Chuky is heavy-bellied, laughing in erratic hiccups, admiring Adi’s rifle as if it were a luxury toy. They drink harsh liquor. Mundo injects something into his arm. And then, in a scene that will keep rewriting itself in the reader’s mind, Mundo offers Adi a moral equation: more sharks, less goats – it’s the same goddamn thing.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
It’s a cynical line, and Miles knows it. It’s also a terrifyingly contemporary line: the way equivalence has become a weapon, how hypocrisy is used to erase distinction, how complexity is flattened into a shrug. Mundo’s point isn’t philosophical purity; it’s resentment at enforcement, at who is paid to harm and who is punished for it. Miles refuses to let Adi simply refute the argument and move on. He makes Adi sit inside it.
The shark finning sequence that follows is among the novel’s most harrowing set pieces – not because it’s graphically detailed for its own sake, but because it is rendered with the calm, procedural brutality of work. A shark is winched aboard, speared, sliced, its fins removed while it thrashes, and then it is kicked back into the sea, alive, to sink. The scene carries the sickening familiarity of contemporary horror: the sense that you are watching something you might have encountered as footage online, an atrocity that can be consumed like content. Adi’s nausea isn’t merely bodily. It is metaphysical disorientation – a sensation from the place where conscience lives, if conscience does have a location.
And then Mundo waves at him from the boat. A friendly wave. A wave that collapses Adi’s need for a boundary. Adi wants a clean line between conservation and extraction, between mandate and cruelty, between duty and sport. Mundo offers him membership in a fraternity of killers – as if killing were not an action but an identity that makes all actors equivalent.
One of Miles’s great achievements is how he shows Adi trying, repeatedly, to bargain his way out of moral contamination – and how the world refuses to accept the bargain. Adi drifts into companionship with a small council of nanny goats near his hut, naming them with the tender absurdity of a lonely mind: Harmony, Booska, Contact Lens, Linda Blair. He feeds a rat who stands on its hind legs at his window opening with prim little forepaws folded, as if petitioning politely for a crumb. He names the rat Oliver. These details might, in a lesser novel, become quirky consolation, the “castaway makes friends with animals” arc. In “Eradication,” they are something sharper: the human compulsion to create relationship as a form of absolution, to believe that if you can establish gentleness somewhere, you have not been entirely claimed by violence.
Music is the novel’s most exquisite counterforce. Adi finds a dead billy goat, its horns strangely vibrant against the parchment ruin of its body, and he takes a horn back like a souvenir – the kind of object he would have brought to Jairo. He cleans it, drills finger holes, and turns it into a crude wind instrument, coaxing out husky, ancient notes. He plays fragments of standards – “Stella by Starlight,” “Stranger on the Shore” – for E3. The bird seems to listen. Harmony bleats along, almost in key, a goat’s voice drifting into something like a duet. The moment is absurd and strangely moving, and Miles lets it be both. He understands that art’s power is not that it fixes anything. Its power is that it creates the sensation of contact in a world that is otherwise a series of separations.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Jairo’s story threads through these musical passages with devastating precision. Jairo is described as neurodivergent, defined by “cognitive rigidity,” a child who demanded rituals the way some people demand air. Sundays were for paper airplanes: one hundred, no more, no less, folded in the morning and flown in the afternoon from stadium bleachers down into a parking lot. Jairo’s face, Adi remembers, would shift into a dreamy, sated expression when planes drifted – a look Adi associates with his own grandfather, who introduced him to early clarinet jazz in a smoke-stained study, tilting his good ear toward the bell. It’s a beautiful braided motif: flight, music, ritual – the human desire to make the world predictable enough to be safe.
The novel refuses to let that desire survive intact. Adi’s attempt to be “less of a killer” by culling only males becomes a form of self-deception. He begins trying to resume the work, to become what the captain called “Mister Killer,” to walk like a predator rather than a grieving teacher. But his hesitation doesn’t protect anyone; it simply redistributes pain. He wounds a magnificent billy goat – a creature rendered with almost patriarchal majesty – and then spends hours tracking blood through ridges and gorges, following droplets like a child hunting Easter eggs. The worst harm is not always the intended harm. Sometimes it’s the bungled harm – the wound that prolongs suffering.
And then, in a small lapse that feels like the novel’s cruelest truth, Adi forgets to cover E3’s box. Oliver, the mannerly rat, does what rats do. Adi returns to feathers and silence. The warbler is truly extinct. This is Miles at his most merciless and most honest: extinction does not require villainy. It can arrive by distraction, exhaustion, grief – by a human being being human in the wrong moment.
In the wake of that loss, Adi rehearses quitting. He imagines calling the foundation, explaining that goats are not metaphors, that the island’s degradation is as much mankind’s doing as the goats’ – we planted them, ignored them, let them multiply, then returned with guns to tidy up our own neglect. It’s a powerful passage, and it would be easy for the book to end as a moral essay about ecological hubris and institutional hypocrisy. Miles refuses that comfort. He knows that moral clarity is not the same as moral escape.
The final confrontation – Mundo and Chuky returning drunk, taking potshots at goats trapped on a cliff ledge as if cruelty were a game – forces Adi into a brutal, clarifying decision. Adi tries to interrupt them with a warning shot and ruptures his eardrum, the pain like a firecracker inside his skull. Mundo waves again, bottle raised, gesturing between goats and Adi: take a shot, join us, fly. Here the novel folds Adi’s private grief into the island’s violence. We learn the circumstances of Jairo’s death: a rooftop, two teenage boys, the unresolved question of push versus fall, Deyanira’s demand that Adi take a gun and avenge their son. Adi refused then because he could not become a killer. The refusal fractured the marriage. Later, vengeance happened anyway, outsourced through other men and other weapons.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Now, on Santa Flora, Adi kneels behind obsidian, steadies the rifle, and shoots Chuky. He shoots again.
It’s a daring ending, because it risks being misread as catharsis. But “Eradication” is not interested in catharsis. It is interested in contamination – in what happens to a person when systems demand violence, when violence becomes the price of saving, when refusing violence is not virtue but abdication. Miles doesn’t ask the reader to cheer. He asks the reader to sit with the sickening fact that Adi’s moral world has snapped from deliberation into action, and that the action is lethal. The novel’s title, by the end, no longer refers only to goats. It refers to the eradication of Adi’s belief in his separateness.
Miles’s prose is what makes this moral architecture feel earned rather than engineered. He can write the island with painterly attention – the “ratty meringues” of clouds, the indigo cove that feels like it drops to the earth’s core – and then pivot into a sentence that carries sardonic humor like a concealed blade. He’s an essayist-novelist in the best sense: alert to the rhetoric people use to justify themselves, alert to the little hypocrisies that become big permissions. Yet he also writes like a musician: scenes recur with variation, motifs return transformed, gestures echo – the wave, the horn, the flight of paper airplanes, the idea of “nature” as indifferent or caring – until the book begins to feel composed rather than merely plotted.
If there is a weakness, it is one shared by many ambitious contemporary novels that want to carry both lyricism and argument. At times the metaphoric density threatens to announce itself, to lean a bit too hard on its own symbolic scaffolding. And the final turn into lethal decisiveness, after so much moral hesitation, will strike some readers as a jolt – not because it’s unbelievable, but because it is the kind of jolt fiction often uses when it wants to end with a bang rather than an ache. Still, one can also read that jolt as the point: our world does not grant endings proportionate to our questions. It grants outcomes.
What lingers after “Eradication” is not a thesis about conservation, though the book has plenty to say about nonprofit moral language, illegal extraction economies, and the way ecological crisis gets narrated as a hunt for villains. What lingers is a more intimate disturbance: the recognition that “saving” is rarely clean, that intention is not protection, that attention is not optional, and that the line between necessity and cruelty is not a line you locate once – it is a line you must redraw, moment by moment, with consequences for every tremor of the hand.
My rating: 92 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 9th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Jonathan Miles’s “Eradication” begins with a proposition that looks, at first glance, almost administratively pure: a damaged ecosystem, an invasive species, a contracted human instrument tasked with removal. It’s the kind of story our era produces instinctively, because it matches the way we’ve learned to speak about crisis – identify the problem, assign a fix, measure outcomes, deliver impact. But Miles is too shrewd, and too alive to the mess of actual lived consequences, to let the premise stay clean for long. What “Eradication” becomes, instead, is a novel about the moral fraudulence of cleanliness itself: the way tidy frameworks – even well-intended ones – collapse the moment a body must enact them.
Adi, the man hired to kill goats on a remote Pacific island called Santa Flora, is not a professional hunter. He is a former schoolteacher and clarinetist, a widower in everything but paperwork, a father after fatherhood has been stripped from him. His son, Jairo, is dead. His marriage has imploded in the wake of that death. The capital has become a geography of avoidance: acquaintances who make sudden U-turns in grocery aisles, colleagues who escape meetings early, the social choreography that surrounds grief like a quarantine line. Santa Flora, then, is not just a conservation assignment. It is exile with an expense report. It is a sanctioned way to disappear.
Miles makes the island tactile before he makes it symbolic. Santa Flora is a comma of land with an unforgiving spine: volcanic ridges, loose tuff cobbles, wet basalt snarls, cruel climbs that turn “as-the-bird-flies” distance into an ordeal. The physical exertion matters because “Eradication” is a novel about moral exertion. Adi’s body is constantly negotiating steepness, friction, exhaustion, and the text quietly suggests that ethics, too, is a terrain – not a principle you hold, but a series of footholds you either find or fail to find under pressure.
The assignment is straightforward in the way the most troubling modern assignments often are. A multinational nonprofit foundation has hired Adi for five weeks to eliminate Santa Flora’s feral goats, an introduced species that has stripped the island of vegetation and threatens endemic birds, reptiles, plants – the whole trembling lattice we’ve learned to call “biodiversity” as if it were a portfolio. Adi arrives with gear, rations, a rifle, and the foundation’s voice already installed in his head: the job is saving a unique ecosystem; the job is preventing extinctions; the job is removing a malignant growth. In our moment, this is familiar language: urgency as ethics, ethics as mandate, mandate as absolution.
But the goats, on the ground, are not malignant growth. They are goats – living, blinking, chewing, stubbornly ordinary. They gather in small segregated groups, nannies here, billies there, the way children sort themselves on a playground. They don’t behave like cinematic prey. They don’t even always behave like they’ve read the headlines about humankind’s danger. Sometimes they simply watch Adi approach, craning their necks as if curious about the strange upright animal crossing their slopes. This is one of the novel’s quiet provocations: it refuses to make the “enemy” narratively convenient.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Adi’s first attempt at moral optimization arrives early, and it’s both funny and revealing. He decides he doesn’t need to kill all the goats. Only the males, he thinks. Without billies, there are no kids; the nanny goats can live out their days until they vanish “quietly.” It’s an elegant managerial solution, halving the labor while preserving the sensation of mercy, and Adi indulges a rare flash of pride. Miles lets us feel the seduction of that pride – the modern faith that if you reframe the problem correctly, ethics becomes efficient.
Santa Flora immediately begins unraveling his efficiencies. The island contains E3, a Santa Flora reed warbler, injured and possibly the last of its kind. The bird is both companion and indictment, a living receipt for the foundation’s claims. Adi must not only kill, he must keep alive one fragile proof of why killing is happening. E3 complicates everything because it refuses metaphor. It needs fresh meat, not canned substitutes, not sun-dried scraps. The bird’s pickiness is not personality; it is ecology. Nature is specific. It does not accept your intentions as nutrition.
As Adi scouts the island – what he tells himself is reconnaissance, a reprieve from wholesale shooting – Miles expands Santa Flora into a moral laboratory. Adi discovers a misted, green pocket of cloud forest, a remnant sanctuary where fog condenses on leaves, where water pools like beads, where the island briefly reveals what it might have been before goats ate its living infrastructure. The scene is written with a lushness that risks romanticizing restoration, and then Miles counters it with the blunt knowledge that restoration often requires violence. The cloud forest is an “oyster disclosing a pearl,” yes – and it is also the justification for bullets.
Then come the humans who make the novel’s ethical pressure turn nearly unbearable. At Santa Flora’s far anchorage, Campo Langosta, Adi is intercepted at night by two shirtless fishermen – Mundo and Chuky – who greet him with a spotlight and a pistol and a shouted question that seems, at first, absurd: Are you government? Adi keeps insisting no, flailing to explain the difference between state and nonprofit, until the only sentence that makes sense in the fishermen’s world is the simplest one: he is here to shoot goats. Their reaction is laughter. Not because it’s harmless, but because it’s insane – because in their economy, killing is either survival or crime, not salaried conservation.
Mundo and Chuky are illegal shark finners, and Miles draws them with the kind of vivid specificity that prevents easy dismissal. Mundo is lean and slot-mouthed, tattooed with sea creatures like a moving atlas of the ocean: moray, octopus, jellyfish, manta ray, tiger shark. Chuky is heavy-bellied, laughing in erratic hiccups, admiring Adi’s rifle as if it were a luxury toy. They drink harsh liquor. Mundo injects something into his arm. And then, in a scene that will keep rewriting itself in the reader’s mind, Mundo offers Adi a moral equation: more sharks, less goats – it’s the same goddamn thing.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
It’s a cynical line, and Miles knows it. It’s also a terrifyingly contemporary line: the way equivalence has become a weapon, how hypocrisy is used to erase distinction, how complexity is flattened into a shrug. Mundo’s point isn’t philosophical purity; it’s resentment at enforcement, at who is paid to harm and who is punished for it. Miles refuses to let Adi simply refute the argument and move on. He makes Adi sit inside it.
The shark finning sequence that follows is among the novel’s most harrowing set pieces – not because it’s graphically detailed for its own sake, but because it is rendered with the calm, procedural brutality of work. A shark is winched aboard, speared, sliced, its fins removed while it thrashes, and then it is kicked back into the sea, alive, to sink. The scene carries the sickening familiarity of contemporary horror: the sense that you are watching something you might have encountered as footage online, an atrocity that can be consumed like content. Adi’s nausea isn’t merely bodily. It is metaphysical disorientation – a sensation from the place where conscience lives, if conscience does have a location.
And then Mundo waves at him from the boat. A friendly wave. A wave that collapses Adi’s need for a boundary. Adi wants a clean line between conservation and extraction, between mandate and cruelty, between duty and sport. Mundo offers him membership in a fraternity of killers – as if killing were not an action but an identity that makes all actors equivalent.
One of Miles’s great achievements is how he shows Adi trying, repeatedly, to bargain his way out of moral contamination – and how the world refuses to accept the bargain. Adi drifts into companionship with a small council of nanny goats near his hut, naming them with the tender absurdity of a lonely mind: Harmony, Booska, Contact Lens, Linda Blair. He feeds a rat who stands on its hind legs at his window opening with prim little forepaws folded, as if petitioning politely for a crumb. He names the rat Oliver. These details might, in a lesser novel, become quirky consolation, the “castaway makes friends with animals” arc. In “Eradication,” they are something sharper: the human compulsion to create relationship as a form of absolution, to believe that if you can establish gentleness somewhere, you have not been entirely claimed by violence.
Music is the novel’s most exquisite counterforce. Adi finds a dead billy goat, its horns strangely vibrant against the parchment ruin of its body, and he takes a horn back like a souvenir – the kind of object he would have brought to Jairo. He cleans it, drills finger holes, and turns it into a crude wind instrument, coaxing out husky, ancient notes. He plays fragments of standards – “Stella by Starlight,” “Stranger on the Shore” – for E3. The bird seems to listen. Harmony bleats along, almost in key, a goat’s voice drifting into something like a duet. The moment is absurd and strangely moving, and Miles lets it be both. He understands that art’s power is not that it fixes anything. Its power is that it creates the sensation of contact in a world that is otherwise a series of separations.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Jairo’s story threads through these musical passages with devastating precision. Jairo is described as neurodivergent, defined by “cognitive rigidity,” a child who demanded rituals the way some people demand air. Sundays were for paper airplanes: one hundred, no more, no less, folded in the morning and flown in the afternoon from stadium bleachers down into a parking lot. Jairo’s face, Adi remembers, would shift into a dreamy, sated expression when planes drifted – a look Adi associates with his own grandfather, who introduced him to early clarinet jazz in a smoke-stained study, tilting his good ear toward the bell. It’s a beautiful braided motif: flight, music, ritual – the human desire to make the world predictable enough to be safe.
The novel refuses to let that desire survive intact. Adi’s attempt to be “less of a killer” by culling only males becomes a form of self-deception. He begins trying to resume the work, to become what the captain called “Mister Killer,” to walk like a predator rather than a grieving teacher. But his hesitation doesn’t protect anyone; it simply redistributes pain. He wounds a magnificent billy goat – a creature rendered with almost patriarchal majesty – and then spends hours tracking blood through ridges and gorges, following droplets like a child hunting Easter eggs. The worst harm is not always the intended harm. Sometimes it’s the bungled harm – the wound that prolongs suffering.
And then, in a small lapse that feels like the novel’s cruelest truth, Adi forgets to cover E3’s box. Oliver, the mannerly rat, does what rats do. Adi returns to feathers and silence. The warbler is truly extinct. This is Miles at his most merciless and most honest: extinction does not require villainy. It can arrive by distraction, exhaustion, grief – by a human being being human in the wrong moment.
In the wake of that loss, Adi rehearses quitting. He imagines calling the foundation, explaining that goats are not metaphors, that the island’s degradation is as much mankind’s doing as the goats’ – we planted them, ignored them, let them multiply, then returned with guns to tidy up our own neglect. It’s a powerful passage, and it would be easy for the book to end as a moral essay about ecological hubris and institutional hypocrisy. Miles refuses that comfort. He knows that moral clarity is not the same as moral escape.
The final confrontation – Mundo and Chuky returning drunk, taking potshots at goats trapped on a cliff ledge as if cruelty were a game – forces Adi into a brutal, clarifying decision. Adi tries to interrupt them with a warning shot and ruptures his eardrum, the pain like a firecracker inside his skull. Mundo waves again, bottle raised, gesturing between goats and Adi: take a shot, join us, fly. Here the novel folds Adi’s private grief into the island’s violence. We learn the circumstances of Jairo’s death: a rooftop, two teenage boys, the unresolved question of push versus fall, Deyanira’s demand that Adi take a gun and avenge their son. Adi refused then because he could not become a killer. The refusal fractured the marriage. Later, vengeance happened anyway, outsourced through other men and other weapons.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Now, on Santa Flora, Adi kneels behind obsidian, steadies the rifle, and shoots Chuky. He shoots again.
It’s a daring ending, because it risks being misread as catharsis. But “Eradication” is not interested in catharsis. It is interested in contamination – in what happens to a person when systems demand violence, when violence becomes the price of saving, when refusing violence is not virtue but abdication. Miles doesn’t ask the reader to cheer. He asks the reader to sit with the sickening fact that Adi’s moral world has snapped from deliberation into action, and that the action is lethal. The novel’s title, by the end, no longer refers only to goats. It refers to the eradication of Adi’s belief in his separateness.
Miles’s prose is what makes this moral architecture feel earned rather than engineered. He can write the island with painterly attention – the “ratty meringues” of clouds, the indigo cove that feels like it drops to the earth’s core – and then pivot into a sentence that carries sardonic humor like a concealed blade. He’s an essayist-novelist in the best sense: alert to the rhetoric people use to justify themselves, alert to the little hypocrisies that become big permissions. Yet he also writes like a musician: scenes recur with variation, motifs return transformed, gestures echo – the wave, the horn, the flight of paper airplanes, the idea of “nature” as indifferent or caring – until the book begins to feel composed rather than merely plotted.
If there is a weakness, it is one shared by many ambitious contemporary novels that want to carry both lyricism and argument. At times the metaphoric density threatens to announce itself, to lean a bit too hard on its own symbolic scaffolding. And the final turn into lethal decisiveness, after so much moral hesitation, will strike some readers as a jolt – not because it’s unbelievable, but because it is the kind of jolt fiction often uses when it wants to end with a bang rather than an ache. Still, one can also read that jolt as the point: our world does not grant endings proportionate to our questions. It grants outcomes.
What lingers after “Eradication” is not a thesis about conservation, though the book has plenty to say about nonprofit moral language, illegal extraction economies, and the way ecological crisis gets narrated as a hunt for villains. What lingers is a more intimate disturbance: the recognition that “saving” is rarely clean, that intention is not protection, that attention is not optional, and that the line between necessity and cruelty is not a line you locate once – it is a line you must redraw, moment by moment, with consequences for every tremor of the hand.
My rating: 92 out of 100.
Read
February 18, 2026Thank you to Libro.FM for this ALC! I think this is such a wonderful fable. I have not read a modern, new take on the fable style in a long time. For the themes and the length, I could absolutely see this being something studied in a classroom setting. It is easy to follow while also giving the reader the chance to think as hard or as little as they want. I’m glad I got a chance to listen! Do be warned if animal cruelty is something that you do not do well with.
February 28, 2026
In Eradication, Jonathan Miles delivers a novel that is short in length but devastating in impact. Lean and tightly coiled, it wastes no time plunging readers into a morally fraught mission that grows darker with every page.
At the center of the novel is a government-sanctioned operation tasked with eliminating an invasive species threatening a fragile ecosystem. The narrative follows a field operative who has built a career on methodical removal—clinical, efficient, detached. The mission seems straightforward at first: contain the spread, protect native wildlife, restore balance. But as the assignment intensifies, so too does the psychological toll. The work begins to blur the line between conservation and cruelty, necessity and rationalization.
The moral axis of the novel is captured in the recurring justification:
“The job is removing a malignant growth that’s been steadily erasing some of the most vulnerable and least studied flora and fauna on the bloody planet, he heard her saying. That’s the job. That’s what it is.”
This quote becomes the book’s spine. The language of disease—malignant growth—frames eradication as surgery, as salvation. Yet Miles subtly questions who gets to define what is malignant, and at what cost. The protagonist clings to this reasoning as both shield and mantra, even as doubts creep in.
Another line crystallizes the novel’s broader meditation on consequence:
“The problem is that history leaves a slime trail, like a snail.”
History, in this story, is never clean. Every intervention drags residue behind it—colonialism, environmental damage, bureaucratic hubris. The eradication effort is not happening in a vacuum; it is layered over previous human missteps. Miles suggests that even well-intentioned correction carries the weight of what came before.
Equally chilling is the quiet normalization of violence:
“If you’ve done something once you can do it forever, he said. Only the first time is difficult.”
This line speaks not just to the protagonist’s work, but to the human capacity for repetition—how quickly the extraordinary becomes routine. The novel probes how moral resistance erodes through practice, how “the first time” becomes a threshold crossed and forgotten.
What makes Eradication especially effective is its circular structure. The book comes full circle, returning to its initial premise with deeper irony and heavier meaning. The ending reframes the mission in a way that forces readers to reconsider the justification that opened the story. Has anything truly been removed? Or has something else—something human—been eroded in the process?
At just over a couple hundred pages, Eradication is compact but resonant. It packs a punch not through spectacle, but through restraint and thematic precision. Miles crafts a tense ecological thriller that doubles as a meditation on power, responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves to make hard choices bearable.
It’s not a comfortable read—but it’s a compelling one.
At the center of the novel is a government-sanctioned operation tasked with eliminating an invasive species threatening a fragile ecosystem. The narrative follows a field operative who has built a career on methodical removal—clinical, efficient, detached. The mission seems straightforward at first: contain the spread, protect native wildlife, restore balance. But as the assignment intensifies, so too does the psychological toll. The work begins to blur the line between conservation and cruelty, necessity and rationalization.
The moral axis of the novel is captured in the recurring justification:
“The job is removing a malignant growth that’s been steadily erasing some of the most vulnerable and least studied flora and fauna on the bloody planet, he heard her saying. That’s the job. That’s what it is.”
This quote becomes the book’s spine. The language of disease—malignant growth—frames eradication as surgery, as salvation. Yet Miles subtly questions who gets to define what is malignant, and at what cost. The protagonist clings to this reasoning as both shield and mantra, even as doubts creep in.
Another line crystallizes the novel’s broader meditation on consequence:
“The problem is that history leaves a slime trail, like a snail.”
History, in this story, is never clean. Every intervention drags residue behind it—colonialism, environmental damage, bureaucratic hubris. The eradication effort is not happening in a vacuum; it is layered over previous human missteps. Miles suggests that even well-intentioned correction carries the weight of what came before.
Equally chilling is the quiet normalization of violence:
“If you’ve done something once you can do it forever, he said. Only the first time is difficult.”
This line speaks not just to the protagonist’s work, but to the human capacity for repetition—how quickly the extraordinary becomes routine. The novel probes how moral resistance erodes through practice, how “the first time” becomes a threshold crossed and forgotten.
What makes Eradication especially effective is its circular structure. The book comes full circle, returning to its initial premise with deeper irony and heavier meaning. The ending reframes the mission in a way that forces readers to reconsider the justification that opened the story. Has anything truly been removed? Or has something else—something human—been eroded in the process?
At just over a couple hundred pages, Eradication is compact but resonant. It packs a punch not through spectacle, but through restraint and thematic precision. Miles crafts a tense ecological thriller that doubles as a meditation on power, responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves to make hard choices bearable.
It’s not a comfortable read—but it’s a compelling one.
January 25, 2026
Veel dank aan Netgalley en Doubleday voor het recensie-exemplaar.
Een man alleen op een eiland met de opdracht om alle geiten op het eiland af te schieten, om zo de biodiversiteit van het eiland te bevorderen? Count me in! En hoewel ik Eradication van Jonathan Miles erg goed geschreven vond en het uitgangspunt me enorm aansprak, miste ik net even dat beetje extra’s dat nodig is voor mij om een verhaal écht goed te vinden.
Adi reageert na enkele persoonlijke tragedies op een vacature. Hij moet vijf weken doorbrengen op het eiland Santa Flora. Het ecologische evenwicht is ernstig verstoord geraakt door de grote hoeveelheid geiten die op het eiland leven. Adi krijgt de opdracht om de geiten te doden om zo het evenwicht te herstellen. Hij komt er echter al snel achter dat hij niet alleen op het eiland is en dat de geiten misschien niet de slechteriken in dit verhaal zijn.
Verfijnd
Eradication is verfijnd geschreven. We zitten voor het grootste deel in de binnenwereld van Adi en het hele boek gaat over hoe het eiland zijn denken en wezen beïnvloedt. De setting is minimaal, de gebeurtenissen draaien vooral om het wel of niet afschieten van een geit, en toch weet Miles constant de aandacht vast te houden. Vooral de manier waarop Miles Adi’s persoonlijke herinneringen aan gebeurtenissen op het eiland weet te koppelen vond ik erg overtuigend.
Zo is er de scene waarop Adi terugdenkt aan zijn carrière als jazzmuzikant en hoe hij zijn klarinet bespeelde. Deze scene vloeit vlekkeloos over in een scene waarin Adi van de hoorn van een geit een muziekinstrument maakt. Het zijn dit soort gebeurtenissen die tonen dat Miles als schrijver veel in zijn mars heeft en die zorgen dat Eradication een erg fijne leeservaring is.
Op zijn kop
Ik merkte gaandeweg echter dat ik hoopte op een gebeurtenis of een visie of een hersenspinsel die het verhaal op zijn kop zou zetten. Die kwam helaas niet. Op driekwart van het verhaal werd het me wel duidelijk dat mijn hoop tevergeefs zou zijn en dat dit verhaal precies in de voorspelbare richting kabbelde als verwacht.
Adi’s uiteindelijke revelatie dat niet de geiten de boosdoeners zijn wanneer het gaat om de bedreiging van de biodiversiteit maar dat de mensen hier de schuldigen zijn, voelde zo afgezaagd aan dat ik er bijna strafpunten voor zou geven. Ware het niet dat ik toch echt wel veel plezier beleefd heb aan de helder geschreven zinnen en een aantal tot de verbeelding sprekende scenes.
Meninkje
Ik kom nog maar eens tot de conclusie dat boeken over de natuur me heel erg aanspreken, evenals eenlingen die in die natuur moeten zien te overleven, maar dat wanneer daarin een kritiek vervat zit over hoe wij als mensen met die natuur omgaan, ik daar enorm op afknap. Dat meninkje ken ik nu wel, hoor. Verzin eens wat nieuws.
Ondanks die afknapper toch nog een ruime voldoende voor Eradication. Dat zegt vooral heel veel over de schrijfkwaliteiten van Miles. Het is met zijn 176 pagina’s en een heleboel wit op de pagina’s een klein verhaal, maar enkele gebeurtenissen spraken me dusdanig aan dat ik ze me nog steeds – weken nadat ik deze roman las – levendig voor de geest kan halen. En dat is indrukwekkend.
blogpost
Een man alleen op een eiland met de opdracht om alle geiten op het eiland af te schieten, om zo de biodiversiteit van het eiland te bevorderen? Count me in! En hoewel ik Eradication van Jonathan Miles erg goed geschreven vond en het uitgangspunt me enorm aansprak, miste ik net even dat beetje extra’s dat nodig is voor mij om een verhaal écht goed te vinden.
Adi reageert na enkele persoonlijke tragedies op een vacature. Hij moet vijf weken doorbrengen op het eiland Santa Flora. Het ecologische evenwicht is ernstig verstoord geraakt door de grote hoeveelheid geiten die op het eiland leven. Adi krijgt de opdracht om de geiten te doden om zo het evenwicht te herstellen. Hij komt er echter al snel achter dat hij niet alleen op het eiland is en dat de geiten misschien niet de slechteriken in dit verhaal zijn.
Verfijnd
Eradication is verfijnd geschreven. We zitten voor het grootste deel in de binnenwereld van Adi en het hele boek gaat over hoe het eiland zijn denken en wezen beïnvloedt. De setting is minimaal, de gebeurtenissen draaien vooral om het wel of niet afschieten van een geit, en toch weet Miles constant de aandacht vast te houden. Vooral de manier waarop Miles Adi’s persoonlijke herinneringen aan gebeurtenissen op het eiland weet te koppelen vond ik erg overtuigend.
Zo is er de scene waarop Adi terugdenkt aan zijn carrière als jazzmuzikant en hoe hij zijn klarinet bespeelde. Deze scene vloeit vlekkeloos over in een scene waarin Adi van de hoorn van een geit een muziekinstrument maakt. Het zijn dit soort gebeurtenissen die tonen dat Miles als schrijver veel in zijn mars heeft en die zorgen dat Eradication een erg fijne leeservaring is.
Op zijn kop
Ik merkte gaandeweg echter dat ik hoopte op een gebeurtenis of een visie of een hersenspinsel die het verhaal op zijn kop zou zetten. Die kwam helaas niet. Op driekwart van het verhaal werd het me wel duidelijk dat mijn hoop tevergeefs zou zijn en dat dit verhaal precies in de voorspelbare richting kabbelde als verwacht.
Adi’s uiteindelijke revelatie dat niet de geiten de boosdoeners zijn wanneer het gaat om de bedreiging van de biodiversiteit maar dat de mensen hier de schuldigen zijn, voelde zo afgezaagd aan dat ik er bijna strafpunten voor zou geven. Ware het niet dat ik toch echt wel veel plezier beleefd heb aan de helder geschreven zinnen en een aantal tot de verbeelding sprekende scenes.
Meninkje
Ik kom nog maar eens tot de conclusie dat boeken over de natuur me heel erg aanspreken, evenals eenlingen die in die natuur moeten zien te overleven, maar dat wanneer daarin een kritiek vervat zit over hoe wij als mensen met die natuur omgaan, ik daar enorm op afknap. Dat meninkje ken ik nu wel, hoor. Verzin eens wat nieuws.
Ondanks die afknapper toch nog een ruime voldoende voor Eradication. Dat zegt vooral heel veel over de schrijfkwaliteiten van Miles. Het is met zijn 176 pagina’s en een heleboel wit op de pagina’s een klein verhaal, maar enkele gebeurtenissen spraken me dusdanig aan dat ik ze me nog steeds – weken nadat ik deze roman las – levendig voor de geest kan halen. En dat is indrukwekkend.
blogpost
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A man takes on a job to try and manage his grief in Jonathan Miles short but powerful new novel Eradication. Eradication is more than this though. It is a meditation on the environment, the impact of people and what we can or are able to do in the face of environmental catastrophe.
When Eradication opens, Adi is being taken by two sailors out to a small island called Santa Flora. The sailors, one of whom is still drunk from the night before, tease him - calling him Mister Killer. when they arrive at the island, where Adi is to spend the next five months they unload a bunch of guns. It turns out that Adi has been employed by an environmental foundation to kill the feral goats of Santa Flora. The goats had been introduced over a hundred years ago by whalers who wanted an easy source of food and in the years since have decimated the island’s natural habitat and species. Adi’s job is to kill all of the goats (there are over 2000) to help bring the island back into balance. Only it emerges very quickly that Adi has never actually fired a gun before and is not, by any definition, a killer.
As already noted Eradication is an environmental fable. Miles considers the damage wrought by human interference and the fortitude and belief it might take to reverse this damage. On the flip side of this, Adi encounters a pair of fishermen who have no qualms about killing or environmental destruction, being involved in the illegal shark fin trade. But Miles also tunes readers into Adi’s personal pain, and how his own past has both driven him to this point but also shapes the way he approaches (or fails to approach) the task that he has taken on.
In an age where everything we do seems to contribute to the degradation of the environment and few know quite where to start in order to address all of the problems that we have caused, Miles gives readers a way to think about living in harmony with the world that we have created. It is not necessarily comfortable and there are no easy answers. And the whole inexorably builds to a disturbing answer in a climax that is both shocking and strangely cathartic.
When Eradication opens, Adi is being taken by two sailors out to a small island called Santa Flora. The sailors, one of whom is still drunk from the night before, tease him - calling him Mister Killer. when they arrive at the island, where Adi is to spend the next five months they unload a bunch of guns. It turns out that Adi has been employed by an environmental foundation to kill the feral goats of Santa Flora. The goats had been introduced over a hundred years ago by whalers who wanted an easy source of food and in the years since have decimated the island’s natural habitat and species. Adi’s job is to kill all of the goats (there are over 2000) to help bring the island back into balance. Only it emerges very quickly that Adi has never actually fired a gun before and is not, by any definition, a killer.
As already noted Eradication is an environmental fable. Miles considers the damage wrought by human interference and the fortitude and belief it might take to reverse this damage. On the flip side of this, Adi encounters a pair of fishermen who have no qualms about killing or environmental destruction, being involved in the illegal shark fin trade. But Miles also tunes readers into Adi’s personal pain, and how his own past has both driven him to this point but also shapes the way he approaches (or fails to approach) the task that he has taken on.
In an age where everything we do seems to contribute to the degradation of the environment and few know quite where to start in order to address all of the problems that we have caused, Miles gives readers a way to think about living in harmony with the world that we have created. It is not necessarily comfortable and there are no easy answers. And the whole inexorably builds to a disturbing answer in a climax that is both shocking and strangely cathartic.
February 23, 2026
Thank you so very much to Doubleday for sending me this wonderful story! It’s out now if you’re interested!
This novella is difficult to read, specifically in terms of the scenes of violence against animals. Those scenes are not gratuitous in any way, but they are graphic and upsetting. But these exist to inform the main character (and readers) of his own hypocrisy, exceptions and to confront reality.
A man deep in the grief of his failed marriage, following the death of his son, responds to an ad to “save the world“. He is sent to a remote island where the biodiversity has been destroyed, and it is being blamed on the goats that live on the island. The goats “pose a threat” and he is sent to “eradicate” that threat. As he’s understanding what this means and what actions he will have to take to “eradicate the threat” he makes rationalizations for why it’s OK or why part of it is OK and has to reckon with his own moral compass.
What I really liked about this book is how much it has to say and how fluidly it says it. I love conversations about what is lawful versus what is moral. I love thinking about ethical consumption. I like to challenge myself to call myself out based on the privilege that I have of being one or two steps removed from things that if I had to do then personally I would be opposed to. This book has all of it. So, if you go into it understanding that there will be violence perpetrated against the animals in these pages, but that it is for the point and for the reader to recognize certain realities, it is a terrific intimate story. I will absolutely be picking up more by this author.
Additionally, I try to always point out in newer works when the r-word is used because I don’t understand why we’re using it in 2026. However, it is used once in here and it is in relation to an incident to subtly indicate, in what is a very short exchange, how this person is viewed and dismissed, and to discredit the two boys who are bearing witness to what happened.
This novella is difficult to read, specifically in terms of the scenes of violence against animals. Those scenes are not gratuitous in any way, but they are graphic and upsetting. But these exist to inform the main character (and readers) of his own hypocrisy, exceptions and to confront reality.
A man deep in the grief of his failed marriage, following the death of his son, responds to an ad to “save the world“. He is sent to a remote island where the biodiversity has been destroyed, and it is being blamed on the goats that live on the island. The goats “pose a threat” and he is sent to “eradicate” that threat. As he’s understanding what this means and what actions he will have to take to “eradicate the threat” he makes rationalizations for why it’s OK or why part of it is OK and has to reckon with his own moral compass.
What I really liked about this book is how much it has to say and how fluidly it says it. I love conversations about what is lawful versus what is moral. I love thinking about ethical consumption. I like to challenge myself to call myself out based on the privilege that I have of being one or two steps removed from things that if I had to do then personally I would be opposed to. This book has all of it. So, if you go into it understanding that there will be violence perpetrated against the animals in these pages, but that it is for the point and for the reader to recognize certain realities, it is a terrific intimate story. I will absolutely be picking up more by this author.
Additionally, I try to always point out in newer works when the r-word is used because I don’t understand why we’re using it in 2026. However, it is used once in here and it is in relation to an incident to subtly indicate, in what is a very short exchange, how this person is viewed and dismissed, and to discredit the two boys who are bearing witness to what happened.
November 21, 2025
This short novel attacks like a bird of prey and carries you off in a story so insular that you will doubt your return from this fevered, morally hot-wired landscape. Santa Flora is the rocky remote island setting inhabited and overrun by thousands of non-native goats, which for years have been devastating the island’s bird habitat and greenery to the point where a philanthropic foundation has decided to intervene. The solution is to send someone with a high-powered rifle and ammunition and supplies for 5 weeks to kill all the goats, and thus restore the ecological balance. The “someone” is Adi, a former 4th grade teacher and musician, who is severed from his life. The reasons for this unfold during the craggy heart-stopping trail of the narrative, as Abi hunts or tries to hunt goats with past tragedies, secrets, and failures as his cerebral companions. And then there are his actual companions, like a wounded bird declared extinct, a rat named Oliver, a goat he should not befriend, and some very dangerous human fisherman. Threading it all together are questions and musings about the moral imperative of killing, killing for the greater good, what the greater good actually is, and how we remove ourselves from the violence underpinning our daily meals. How Miles manages all these weighty themes with insight and often incredible humor is a minor miracle. The ending is a knockout and made me want to immediately start reading the book over again. This small book is a stunner.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
What if you decide to leave your former life behind and agree to travel to the island Santa Flora to eradicate its non-indigenous population of goats - or as Miles calls them "cancer cells that bleat"? That is the task Adi agrees to in the fable 'Eradication'. Adi's life is scarred by loss and the escape to the island is his search for new meaning and purpose.
As a reader you join Adi's exploration of the island and discover what humans have caused and often times forgotten about. And when confronted with the environmental destruction, what do you do about it?
To begin with this novel is not easily put in one box. It combines an eariness one minute with incredible humour the next. Throughout Miles uses wonderfully lyrical language. As a non-native English speaker I had to look up quite a few words, but that did not take away from the enjoyment of the writing. The original ways in which Miles describes nature and emotions I found very impressing.
This is a novel you can read in different ways; just take the story at face value or ponder about the deeper meaning of 'Eradication'. A few days after finishing the book I'm still pondering. To me that is the sign of a well constructed story.
I absolutely recommend 'Eradication' for its lyricality, humour and uneasiness it conveys.
Thank you to Netgalley and Quercus Books for the Advanced Readers Copy in exchange for my honest review.
As a reader you join Adi's exploration of the island and discover what humans have caused and often times forgotten about. And when confronted with the environmental destruction, what do you do about it?
To begin with this novel is not easily put in one box. It combines an eariness one minute with incredible humour the next. Throughout Miles uses wonderfully lyrical language. As a non-native English speaker I had to look up quite a few words, but that did not take away from the enjoyment of the writing. The original ways in which Miles describes nature and emotions I found very impressing.
This is a novel you can read in different ways; just take the story at face value or ponder about the deeper meaning of 'Eradication'. A few days after finishing the book I'm still pondering. To me that is the sign of a well constructed story.
I absolutely recommend 'Eradication' for its lyricality, humour and uneasiness it conveys.
Thank you to Netgalley and Quercus Books for the Advanced Readers Copy in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
The world sucks and life sucks, so Adi (a jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher) answers an ad for a new job. Save the world
and
do it alone from an isolated Pacific Island. What could go wrong?
The job is designed to right the ecological balance of the island. If not done, countless bird and plant species will become extinct. Alone time tends to make most people fall into contemplative daydreams and memories, and Adi is no different. We hear Adi’s backstory in pieces, and find reasons why he is perfect for the job, yet not so perfect.
Tragedy can bring a never-ending cycle of responsibility, guilt, blame, and revenge. Do we need to totally mutilate our sense of self again and again to rectify things? I don’t know. No one does. Most of us are doing the best we can out here with only vague rules, and we mess things up a lot. Not on a global scale, sure, unless we are someone whose decisions affect the world. Then again, aren’t we all?
Regarding the audiobook specifically, the narrator was perfect. He did an outstanding job, and his voice is nice to listen to. And then rewind because you missed things and listen to again. You know what I mean.
Thanks to Doubleday, Penguin Random House Audio, Jonathan Miles (author), Edelweiss, and Libro.fm for providing an advance digital copy and advance listening copy of Eradication (narrated by Tom Alexander). Their generosity did not influence my review in any way.
The job is designed to right the ecological balance of the island. If not done, countless bird and plant species will become extinct. Alone time tends to make most people fall into contemplative daydreams and memories, and Adi is no different. We hear Adi’s backstory in pieces, and find reasons why he is perfect for the job, yet not so perfect.
Tragedy can bring a never-ending cycle of responsibility, guilt, blame, and revenge. Do we need to totally mutilate our sense of self again and again to rectify things? I don’t know. No one does. Most of us are doing the best we can out here with only vague rules, and we mess things up a lot. Not on a global scale, sure, unless we are someone whose decisions affect the world. Then again, aren’t we all?
Regarding the audiobook specifically, the narrator was perfect. He did an outstanding job, and his voice is nice to listen to. And then rewind because you missed things and listen to again. You know what I mean.
Thanks to Doubleday, Penguin Random House Audio, Jonathan Miles (author), Edelweiss, and Libro.fm for providing an advance digital copy and advance listening copy of Eradication (narrated by Tom Alexander). Their generosity did not influence my review in any way.
February 21, 2026
Killers kill, Jonathan Miles lets his readers know, from the beginning to the end of Eradication. What we have here is a grim little exercise that shows the cruelty of mercy.
Our poor protagonist Adi, has taken a job on a remote island to fight back against an aggressive invasive species. It’s a bit of conservation by way of superior firepower, and it doesn’t sit right with Adi. Reeling from personal tragedy, Adi is one of the worst choices to strand on an island, and he experiences something of a coming-of-rage story as he struggles to reconcile his feelings with his mission.
Eradication is a slim volume, dashing headlong into its conclusion with only a minimum of plot, but a lot of internal conflict. Miles gets the job done with lean prose and a steady pace. It’s entertaining, but that thing about Adi being a poor choice for the job is a bit of a plothole – the entire setup for Adi’s adventure seems ill-considered – and Miles uses italics for dialogue, which I found confusing at times.
It’s a good read, and it makes its point with visceral ferocity, but it feels almost too compact, as if its author doesn’t quite trust his readers to keep up unless he drags us along. Readers who want a glimpse into the existential contradictions of conservation will find themselves well served, but I feel I spent more money than I should have for a couple of hours of entertainment.
Our poor protagonist Adi, has taken a job on a remote island to fight back against an aggressive invasive species. It’s a bit of conservation by way of superior firepower, and it doesn’t sit right with Adi. Reeling from personal tragedy, Adi is one of the worst choices to strand on an island, and he experiences something of a coming-of-rage story as he struggles to reconcile his feelings with his mission.
Eradication is a slim volume, dashing headlong into its conclusion with only a minimum of plot, but a lot of internal conflict. Miles gets the job done with lean prose and a steady pace. It’s entertaining, but that thing about Adi being a poor choice for the job is a bit of a plothole – the entire setup for Adi’s adventure seems ill-considered – and Miles uses italics for dialogue, which I found confusing at times.
It’s a good read, and it makes its point with visceral ferocity, but it feels almost too compact, as if its author doesn’t quite trust his readers to keep up unless he drags us along. Readers who want a glimpse into the existential contradictions of conservation will find themselves well served, but I feel I spent more money than I should have for a couple of hours of entertainment.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews