Creating Community

Whether hot off the presses or on the shelves for years, a good book is worth talking about.

- AMY JONES

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Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton (Grand Central Publishing, Literary fiction/satire, January 2025)

SYNOPSIS: The small, rural (imaginary) Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino is on the verge of disappearing from the map. Its one beloved restaurant has closed, the town hall has been overrun with mice, and any tourist who gets lost enough to end up in the town is quickly scared away by AI Pacino, the perpetually pregnant and angry cat sitting next to the welcome sign in the piazza, or Giuseppina, whose misguided efforts at attracting tourists by flashing them or making them an incontinently strong espresso, depending on their ageruns them off. All of this is now Delizia's responsibility, as the newly elected mayor (beating out a disgraced postman and an actual donkey old enough to drink). The more she digs into town records, the more trouble and debt-she finds.

So, when Giovanni Scarpazza and his beloved dogs, Fagiolo and

Aria, discover an enormous (and enormously valuable) truffle on their daily truffle hunts, perhaps the town's problems are solved.

Unless things go dramatically and hilariously awry as Delizia and Giuseppina try to figure out how to bring in auctioneers for a worldwide bidding contest before the truffle starts to go bad, setting in motion a series of events that threaten to pull the town apart before bringing them together.

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