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A Fable
by Jonathan Miles
Book Reviewed by:From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles ("a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"—Los Angeles 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 assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that's gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren't exactly what his employers said they were—and, complicating things further, he discovers he's not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies—and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude, as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, "a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer" (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.
Excerpt
Eradication
The first sailor was beefy and tall and already sweating before the sun was risen. The second sailor was missing.
He'll be along, the first sailor told Adi. With a flashlight jammed between his teeth he was filling out clipboarded forms and humming what sounded like a melody braked to quarter-speed, groany and dirgelike and, for Adi, unsettling in the predawn dark. The boat, a thirty-foot center console with two giant outboard motors, kept thunking the dock where Adi stood as the sailor went rummaging about the deck, opening and closing storage hatches to dash items from his checklist. He'll be along, he repeated, though to whom it was unclear.
After a while the sailor clapped his hands together and motioned to Adi's gear on the dock, which Adi handed down: two fat duffels, a backpack, four cellophane-sealed boxes, a pair of heavy plastic crates, a satellite phone pack, and a long thin black case secured with padlocks. There was no mistaking the latter as anything but a...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (2/12/2026)
...I wanted something more. Now reading This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Too soon to comment. Listening to the small fable called Eradication by Jonathan Miles. I'll finish it tomorrow and I think I like it.
-Anne_Glasgow
At 160 pages, Eradication's meager length masks its meaty ideas. Miles has a lot to say about our current environmental catastrophe and the weaknesses of human nature that perpetuate it; readers might only wish that he had given himself more space in which to say it. But they can nevertheless be grateful for what he's delivered: a sharp, funny novel of ideas that bristles with rage at what humanity can wreak on the world...continued
Full Review
(627 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter
Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected—a story for our times, and all powered by the writer's tremendous narrative imagination. Maria Reva, author of Endling
In Eradication, Jonathan Miles tackles the brutal paradoxes of ecological conservation with both unflinching clarity and comedic flair. When saving an imperilled Eden means eliminating [sacrificing?] one species—whose only crime is to 'refuse to stop living'—to protect dozens more, there are no easy answers. A deft, unsettling exploration of what it means to play God.The premise of Jonathan Miles's darkly comic novel Eradication is fiendishly simple: a man is hired by a humanitarian foundation to sail to a desert island and, in the name of biodiversity, kill every goat he can find. To such an intriguing set-up, Miles attaches an equally intriguing subtitle: A Fable. It's a word that evokes myth and fairy tale—a signpost letting the reader know that they're no longer held by the bounds of reality. But what exactly is a fable, and how does Eradication fit into this millennia-old tradition?
Fables, in their most basic form, are short narratives usually featuring anthropomorphized animals. Above all, they convey a moral—that is, a pithy saying offering the audience a lesson on how...
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—Ann Patchett
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
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