Growing up, author Kira Jane Buxton had mixed feelings about her peripatetic childhood. Thanks to her father’s job, her family hopped around the globe, spending time in Dubai, Jakarta, Singapore, Korea and Texas. It was an upbringing full of adventures — playing in dunes, exploring tropical jungles, making friends with the neighborhood animals — but at times, Buxton and her younger sister felt adrift.

Novelist Kira Jane Buston

Photo courtesy of Kira Jane Buxton

“In the ’90s, all the stories I read, all the movies I watched, were about small-town communities that would band together and rise up against some injustice,” says Buxton, the Thurber Prize finalist behind 2019’s zombie apocalypse adventure Hollow Kingdom, its sequel Feral Creatures and the recently released novel Tartufo (Grand Central Publishing). “I was intrigued by that. Because we moved around a lot, my sister and I went up to my mom one day and said, ‘We don’t have any roots!’”

At the time, Buxton’s mother was editing a lifestyle magazine in Jakarta, and one of their contributors had recently written a story about living as an expat in Italy. “She had found roots in a tiny village in Tuscany,” Buxton says. “My mom befriended her, we all went to Tuscany, and very unimaginatively fell in love with a house there.”

If you’ve read Tartufo, you probably know where this story is going. Buxton’s parents purchased the house — meeting an impeccably dressed woman in a fur coat on a desolate country road to hand over a sack of cash — and the family spent many summers in the small, medieval village sipping prosecco, eating local cuisine and fighting off the wild boars that came nightly to forage for vegetables in Buxton’s father’s garden. Seven years ago, a landslide damaged the house and almost killed Buxton’s father, forcing him and his wife to move into their local village, where they remain to this day.

“That landslide inspired much of the book,” Buxton says of Tartufo, which takes readers on a raucous romp through the Tuscan countryside as the dying fictional village of Lazzarini Boscarino makes a last ditch effort to save itself with a plan to auction off a recently discovered, record breaking truffle to the snobbish culinary elite. Infused with Buxton’s trademark comedy — a geriatric donkey that nearly wins the mayoral election, a local buxom bartender who can only be described as a total force, laugh-out-loud misunderstandings and mishaps, and an apt range of metaphors from the poignant “wet weekend of a man” to a cat “best described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet brush”— the book is a page-turning adventure through the type of Italian village that one hopes they stumble upon during a dreamy summer holiday.

While Buxton’s hallmark humor and careful attention to the animal kingdom are features of Tartufo, the novel is unmistakably a departure from her previous work. Rooted in present-day reality, it is an escapist tale that dives deep into human relationships, showing the power of connection and what can happen when a community, no matter how ragtag, bands together with a common goal. It’s a heart-warming (and did I mention funny?) tale of resilience — the kind of story that inspired Buxton growing up. And also, there are truffles.

“I’m a huge, unabashed truffle pig,” Buxton says. “I’m always snuffling them out in any way I can. I find them so fascinating. It’s a smelly, hideous, subterranean fungus that is really nature’s rags-to riches story. It’s pulled from the dirt, then goes on this byzantine journey: sometimes it’s flown all the way to the other side of the world and put on a beautiful plate of pasta in a Michelin-starred restaurant.”

The prized truffle at the heart of Buxton’s new novel

Photo courtesy of Kira

The author has some experience with truffle hunting (a major plot point in the book, and a process that Buxton describes with gorgeously melodic language), having gone on several tours both in the Northwest and Italy, an experience she highly recommends. But it’s not just the pasta-enhancing goodness that attracted Buxton to the fungus. A larger idea is at stake. “There is an allegory in the truffle,” she says. “It lives in symbiosis with the tree. It’s not just ecology, but it suggests a social structure where we are more powerful when we are connected to community.”