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A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning. “An instant classic.” — The Washington Pos t • “Excellent ” — The New York Times • “Urgent and lyrical.” —NPR “Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected — a story for our times.”—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schoolteacher Adi answers a job listing offering a chance to save the world. The assignment: spend five weeks alone on the tiny Pacific island of Santa Flora, restoring an ecological balance gone dangerously awry by an invasive population of goats. Though he has no experience in wildlife management, he is hired anyway. Armed with little more than survival gear and uneasy resolve, he sets out to remove what doesn’t belong. But the mission is not what it seems. The threats to the once-Edenic island aren’t w