Jonathan Miles

And it turns out it is a bird that was thought to have gone extinct in the 1980s.

And the reason that the bird was thought to have gone extinct was because of the so-called invasive goats had decimated its habitat.

And that fills him with a kind of renewed purpose to actually complete the mission he's been given.

But of course, things get complicated.

You know, I called the book a fable because fables are an age-old genre of storytelling in which animals often stand in for human beings or for human dilemmas in stories that have some kind of moral dimensions.

And, you know, as I explained the origins of the novel, it was always about

the moral dimensions of this and the moral dimensions of human beings on this planet, and even the dimensions of nature.

You know, what is nature?

Is nature just a construct that we humans have come up with to describe something that we think is separate from us?

Right?

So the moral questions were always undergirding it.

And anytime you start

thinking about morality in terms of humans on this planet, you run into these moral dilemmas.

And you run into our own, you know, ham-handedness in dealing with them.

Well, so it's funny because I've never really and I don't think there is a hard and fast line between novellas and novels.

I think it's like that line between Fettuccine and Linguini.

One is just a little thicker than the other, but, you know, that's sure they get measured maybe in Italy.

I always knew it was going to be a short novel.

And there's a couple sort of things about that.

I mean, partly, every novel tends to claim its own amount of real estate, right?