Name: Aftertaste
Author: Daria Lavelle

Aftertaste, Daria Lavelle’s debut novel, is an absorbing recipe of grief-fueled drama, romance, and urban food fantasy starring an underdog chef. Read my full review.

Publication: Bloomsbury ANZ, June 2025.

Genre: Literature, Urban Fantasy, Drama, Romance, Mystery

Aftertaste Publisher Synopsis

A food story to binge. A ghost story to devour. A love story to savour.

When dead-end dishwasher Kostya discovers the ability to summon spirits through the food he cooks, he embarks on a journey to open a New York City restaurant that serves closure – something he’s craved for as long as he can remember.

There are just three problems:

1. Kostya has some ghosts of his own.

2. His advancing menu of spirit cuisine is threatening the stability of the Afterlife itself.

3. He’s falling in love with Maura, a party psychic with her own secret connection to the Afterlife – who also happens to be the one person who knows he must be stopped.

A bittersweet cocktail of humour and heart, Aftertaste is an imaginative odyssey through food and love, life and death: the things that sustain us, connect us, transport us, and remind us who we are.

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My Review

I love it when a debut author throws caution to the wind and delivers a hard-hitting genre mashup like Daria Lavelle has in Aftertaste. I admire their courage and appreciate their faith in readers’ capacity to connect with their dark humour and satire.

Wait a minute? If you are thinking the book I’ve just read sounds less fluffy than the publisher synopsis would at first suggest, then you are spot on. Don’t get me wrong… the marketing copy is not technically misleading because there are a lot of humour and pop references woven into this engaging storyline. Plus, it will make foodies salivate. But, it is appealingly salty rather than sweet.

In a weird-ass twist of fate, the kind of bullsh#t plotline only a novelist could devise, he had somehow managed to prop open a port, all I-see dead-people style, only without the crazy color-coding.

The fuel that propels Aftertaste is grief and anguish. Death is discussed liberally – natural, accidental and intentional – with the latter quite vividly depicted.

So, trigger warnings for those who value them aside, I found Daria Lavelle’s impactful literary writing style highly absorbing.

The walls were wood paneled, a take on somebody’s uncle’s basement; the carpets red shag, a communal grave of Elmo dolls.

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And, you cannot help rooting for Aftertaste‘s hapless underdog lead Kostya.

“Then you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot. Nobody likes regret.” Kostya didn’t like it, exactly, but regret was a sort of personal comfort zone. He’d spent years familiarizing himself with its terrain, its streets and alleyways and all the doors of Opportunity that populated them, locked and dead-bolted against some stupid whim he might one day have, to try to open them.

Lavelle’s scenes and characters come alive on the page (even those that are not!). They feel achingly real, their emotions are messy. This book actually brought back memories of reading Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators in that respect.

While I have reservations about this novel’s ending, I cannot deny its emotional and literary gravitas. If you enjoy reading impactful and thought-provoking writing, Daria Lavelle’s debut Aftertaste is well worth adding to your reading menu.