What if you could have one last meal with someone you’ve loved, someone you’ve lost? Combining the magic of Under the Whispering Door with the high-stakes culinary world of Sweetbitter, Aftertaste is an epic love story, a dark comedy, and a synesthetic adventure through food and grief.
Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around Kostya ever since. Kostya can’t exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he’s never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he’s tasting. And everything changes.
Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes for them to eat a dish that he’s prepared. He thinks his life’s purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him.
Set in the bustling world of New York restaurants and teeming with mouthwatering food writing, Aftertaste is a whirlwind romance, a heart-wrenching look at love and loss, and a ghost story about all the ways we hunger—and how far we’d go to find satisfaction.
Lavelle’s debut is a multi-course tasting menu of a book that will sate, delight, excite, comfort, and inspire even the pickiest of readers.
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle
Narrators: André Santana, Ari Fliakos, Kristen Sieh and Tessa Albertson
My Rating: 4/5?
Goodreads Rating: 3.99?
Storygraph Rating: 4.15?
Length: 10hrs 23mins / 400pgs
Fiction | Fantasy | Paranormal | Speculative | Romance
Pacing: Medium
Spice: Low
Gore: None
Aftertaste is Daria Lavelle’s debut novel which I discovered when ticking off the Goodreads ‘Debut Darling’ bookmark challenge. It is a story about love, death, grief and sacrifice all bundled up with some delicious culinary magic. Flag here, this book tackles some very heavy themes in death, grief and suicide so tread carefully if you are sensative to these topics.
Our main character Konstantin Duhovny is the son of Russian immigrants who moved to America when he was very young. His father pushed the move in the hopes to give his family a better life. Unfortunately, his father died when he was 10 years old, leaving Konstantin and his mother in a foreign land having lost the anchor of their lives and they both never fully recover. To complicate matters, not long after his father’s death, Konstantin starts having a strange phenomenon of food he’s never tasted before in his mouth for fleeting moments, right down to individual ingredients and how they are cooked which he refers to as his ‘aftertaste’.
The story mostly follows Konstantin as he struggles through life, never getting over the loss of his father and how he eventually understands what his ‘aftertaste’ means and how he could possibly use it to see his father one last time and hopefully get some closure by cooking the exact match to his ’aftertaste’. Through his new love for cooking Konstantin finally has joy and contentment in his life, but there is always a price, even if you don’t know what it is. Other main characters are Konstantin’s best friend Frankie and Konstantin’s love interest Moira, both of whom have a complicated impact on his life.
If you are a foodie and/or interested in the afterlife this is the book for you. It was such an interesting take on death and how we live afterwards impacts both ourselves and the loved ones we have lost in the spirit world. I loved how the food was the link between the spirit and their special person and the detail Lavelle put into that had my mouth watering. Especially as so often in life it’s the meals we share with those we love that can be some of our best memories. A very solid debut novel by Daria Lavelle.
Julia Kitvaria Sarene