The Truffle Book has steadily been taking shape over the last few weeks. I’ve got one more chapter to lay out, but the rest is ready for proofreading and the cover is in the final stages of tweaking. Off to a printer in a couple of weeks. Out in October?

With luck, it will attract attention on bookshop shelves, if only because the truffle on the cover could, according to a friend of mine, be mistaken by the uninitiated as a turd. I think it looks rather more like a warty UFO, but if it is in any way turd-like, then I will claim that this was a deliberate design ploy on my part, designed to set up a cognitive dissonance in the viewer, thus drawing them in to check out the book.

The truffle itself weighed 30g, was harvested at John & Iris Burn’s Ashburton truffière in July, and provided by them for photography free of charge. Sadly, from an eating point of view, it had been frozen. Thanks very much indeed, John and Iris. You’ll be getting a credit in the book, of course.