True to its fable-like form, "Eradication" is spare and deliberate. What’s meant to surprise isn’t the story’s direction, but the sudden intensity of detail that interrupts its quiet surface.

The novel follows Adi, a former teacher who has taken on the assignment of eradicating goats from a remote island, where their presence threatens the native wildlife with extinction. But the ungulate plague, much like the man himself, is not without its nuances. And as Adi soon learns, all judgments are merely a matter of perspective.

Miles turns even the stillest settings into spaces rich with sensation, humor, and thought. His writing moves across the page like brushstrokes on a canvas: precise, intriguing, and uninhibited. In only a few lines, he renders landscapes and lives that graze against the world’s negative space.

The goats—alive in movement, scent, tendon, and sexual urge—form "Eradication"’s core. That focus, and the parallels it draws, quietly shape the novel’s rhythm. And despite the visceral probes into animal flesh—cleaved, consumed, and laden with its own longings—the novel reads with surprising softness. This human angle persists even as sharp fragments of Adi’s past flicker into view, hinting at narratives that could easily stand on their own.

With its butchery and attentiveness to bodily impulses, it’s clear that a dramatic conclusion isn’t the point. Instead, in its compression, "Eradication" offers a palpable—if brief—encounter with a world humanity has yet to understand, and can never be fully reckoned with.

This book was an alluring and amusing commentary on humanity and its effect on itself and the natural world. Set in isolation with a morbid task, to eradicate an island of its invasive goats, the protagonist grapples with his grief. The author requires the reader to confront morality and ethics of human behavior with tender memories and encounters as well as the depravity of mankind.