Miles, Jonathan: Eradication

‘Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected - a story for our times, and all powered by the writer‘s tremendous narrative imagination‘ Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter Eradication is a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on a remote 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 assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora and reckon with its invasive population of goats that‘s sent the ecological balance severely out of whack, and in doing so preserve the 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.