The Truffle Hunter of Motovun
A Novel of Istria

About this book:

In the mist-cloaked forests of Istria, seventy-year-old Marko Posa hunts white truffles with his dog Bela, navigating a landscape where every oak root holds a memory—and every shadow might hide a border guard. It's the 1970s, and Yugoslavia's state cooperatives are putting prices on the forest's secrets, but Marko has outlasted Austrians, Italians, and partisans alike. He knows the Mirna valley's language: the scent of wet loam and garlic that means *Tuber magnatum*, the rhythm of rain on limestone, the silent pact between an old man and his dog. When a police officer warns of new licenses and tractors prepare to fell the ancient oak groves, Marko realizes the real quarry isn't fungus—it's the survival of a way of life that answers to no flag.

Layered with the aromas of woodsmoke, fermenting grape, and the intoxicating musk of "white gold," *The Truffle Hunter of Motovun* is a novel of quiet resistance and buried histories. From the Venetian lions on Motovun's gates to the unmarked partisan trenches in the woods, from the cold-war border slicing through olive terraces to the hollow trunk holding decades-old letters, every chapter digs deeper into a land where regimes rot like leaves but the forest remembers. Marko's lame knee forecasts rain better than any barometer; his spade uncovers more than truffles.

Atmospheric, suspenseful, and steeped in the mud and magic of a contested corner of Europe, this is a story about what remains when maps are redrawn and laws change: the bond between hunter and dog, the taste of sheep's cheese in a damp coat pocket, the weight of a perfect truffle in a calloused palm—and the stubborn, singular act of putting one boot in front of the other up the ancient mule track, toward home.