Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

“A haunting evocation of pain and pleasure, and the power of food.” —Nigella Lawson

What if you could sit down to one last meal with someone you’ve lost? That’s the aching, beautiful question at the heart of this debut novel — part dark comedy, part ghost story, part swooning romance, and entirely unforgettable.

Konstantin Duhovny has lived with a strange gift since childhood: he can taste the presence of ghosts. Flavors of meals he’s never eaten flood his mouth when spirits are near. When he finally acts on what he’s tasting, he discovers he can reunite the grieving with their lost loved ones — for exactly as long as a single dish lasts. In pursuit of this purpose, he plunges headfirst into the gloriously chaotic world of New York restaurants. But something is going wrong in the Afterlife, and the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped is also falling helplessly in love with him.

Blending the warmth of Under the Whispering Door with the high-stakes kitchen energy of Sweetbitter, this is a novel that will make you hungry, make you cry, and make you want to call someone you love.

• A love story to savor
• A ghost story to devour
• A food story to binge

Rich with mouthwatering food writing and genuine emotional depth, this is exactly the kind of discovery you make when you let yourself linger on the right shelf at the right moment. It’s the kind of book we press into people’s hands here without a second thought.

Perfect for fans of literary fantasy, culinary fiction, and love stories that linger long after the last page.

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