Jonathan Miles’s clever new novel, Eradication, begins, like Robinson Crusoe, with its protagonist on a boat journey that will eventually lead him to a desert island. Unlike Defoe’s hero, Adi turns out to be a willing castaway. He is travelling to Santa Flora, a tropical island of Miles’s creation, sent by an environmental foundation that has tasked him with ‘saving the world’. His job is to exterminate the invasive population of goats that has been grazing the island’s forested ecosystem bare. Any misgivings that Adi might have are secondary, for the moment, to his mysterious ‘desire to flee the red pain of the world’.

Things rarely go well on literary desert islands and Miles riffs on misadventures from castaway novels past. The cannibals with whom Crusoe shares his island are reimagined here as leering shark hunters, whose brutality appalls Adi, putting him off his own bloody project. He watches from a clifftop as they