Avid readers tend to rely on folks they trust, or at least see as kindred spirits, to recommend them new books. This is what I do professionally - it’s my actual job to be that trusted source for a wide variety of readers. It’s a pretty good job, as they come, and I don’t take it lightly.
But how do booksellers like me hear about books? This is where, if you think about it too much, this bookselling thing starts to feel a little magical. Because, sure, we talk to publishers, and we sit in sales meetings hearing about big, buzzy books with marketing budgets, and many of those books are really good. But what about the strange, under-the-radar, not-for-everyone-but-maybe-for-you books? The books that surprise you, that come out of nowhere?
Often as not, we hear about them from each other: It’s just booksellers, all the way down. Over the years, I’ve encouraged colleagues to read a variety of titles, from translated Scandinavian seafaring epics to dystopian novels about werewolf fanfiction written entirely in rhyming couplets (yes, really). And I, too, have been told by fellow booksellers—sometimes loudly and passionately, and sometimes in a sort of conspiratorial whisper—about a book I must read. And, like any serious reader, there are certain booksellers I have learned to pay attention to.
This is how I came to find myself in possession of a copy of a slim purple book with a goat on the cover. The book was Jonathan Miles’ Eradication: A Fable, and a bookseller whose taste I trust blindly wouldn’t shut up about it. And now, neither will I.
Let me say right off the bat that Eradication is not for everybody. It is dark, morally thorny, and heavy with grief, both personal and for a changing world. But it was the right book for me when I read it, and so I must pass it forward, because, if you’re one of those readers who has come to see me as a kindred spirit, it could be the right book for you. That’s how this whole thing works, after all.
Eradication tells the story of Adi, a man who, reeling from a devastating loss, has taken a job on a remote island in the Pacific, helping to restore a fragile ecosystem that has been set off balance by an invasive species. The invasive creatures in question are goats. And “helping to restore a fragile ecosystem” actually boils down to one crude task: kill as many goats as possible.
Adi is not a scientist. Nor is he a hunter, and he is woefully unprepared to be deposited, alone, in the middle of the ocean to carry out such a violent mission. He struggles to feed himself and secure shelter. He struggles with the total isolation of the setting. He struggles to shoot his intended targets—both because of his aversion to the killing and because he is a very poor shot—and he struggles with his own loss, and his fear that he may have been responsible. He struggles to reconcile his moral qualms about the slaughter—the goats are, themselves, only on the island because people put them there in the first place—and with the very real damage he can see the herd doing. And he struggles with the feeling that the only impact he seems to have, on anything, is to cause yet more damage.
But, before he’s had much time to settle in, things veer in an unexpected direction. Because, it turns out, he’s not alone on the island, after all. And here—a human working for a group of humans, employing violence in an attempt to reverse damage caused by humans—Adi begins to wonder if the goats are the real problem.
I won’t tell you how all this ends. I’m not sure Miles does, even. Eradication self-identifies as a fable, but I keep thinking of it as more of a koan. It’s decisive, but also a little open ended. It’s telling you something, but not necessarily what you ought to think or feel about it. It’s a conclusion that will challenge you, one that begs you to question it. Sometimes, that’s what the best fiction does to us.
In fact, reading Eradication—and being challenged in just that way—helped remind me why I love to read fiction in the first place, and what’s so special about being a bookseller. I may spend most of my time telling other people what to read, but I still relish the experience of having someone say, Hey, give this one a try! That’s how this weird, dark gem of a novel came to me, anyway. Maybe you’ll want to give it a try, too.
Sam and Emma Kaas own and run the Norwich Bookstore.
