Daria Lavelle, "Aftertaste" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Daria Lavelle, "Aftertaste"

Date: December 9, 2025
Host: GP Gottlieb
Guest: Daria Lavelle
Book: Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Daria Lavelle about her debut novel, Aftertaste. The book blends ghost story with foodie narrative, following the life of Kostya Dahovny, a young man uniquely gifted—or haunted—with the ability to taste the last meals craved by the dead. The discussion explores themes of grief, immigrant family dynamics, culinary passion, and the intricate connection between food and memory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Personal Connection to Food

• Daria’s Background: Grew up in a Ukrainian immigrant family where cooking and food traditions were essential.
  • “My family is Ukrainian. …Ukrainian food and cooking everything from scratch were just sort of staples in my household.” (03:00 — Daria Lavelle)
• Observing a chef cousin’s journey in New York deeply informed parts of the book.

2. The Tasting Game and Memory

• The “guess what I’m feeding you” game between Kostya and his father becomes a powerful emotional touchstone.
  • “The object of the game is to correctly guess what he’s”— Daria on the origins of the tasting game. (04:51)
• Daria herself didn’t play the exact game but remembers sampling family cooking as a bonding ritual.

3. Childhood Grief and Guilt

• Kostya’s last words to his father (a childish rebuke) before his dad’s sudden death serve as the emotional lodestone for the entire narrative.
  • “That’s kind of the last thing he ever says to his dad. …it serves as this sort of anchor and this reason for why, following his father’s death, Kostya can’t seem to move on from it.” (06:10 — Daria Lavelle)

4. Kostya’s Supernatural Palate

• Kostya begins to experience vivid, involuntary aftertastes of meals he never ate—initially interpreted as messages from his father, but eventually realized to be the last tastes yearned for by different spirits.
  • “The aftertastes are these tastes, these flavors just appear in his mouth kind of magically, psychically.” (07:15 — Daria Lavelle)
• Preparing these dishes, he learns, can summon the corresponding spirit for a final meal.
  • “By cooking this food, he can actually bring a spirit back from the afterlife for a last meal.” (10:18 — Daria Lavelle)

5. Family Dynamics: Relationship with Vera (Kostya’s Mother)

• Vera, trapped in her own grief, withdraws, forcing Kostya into adulthood prematurely.
  • “She is entangled in her own loss and it affects her so profoundly that she can’t even bring herself to take care of her child.” (08:14 — Daria Lavelle)

6. Nicknames and Russian Literary Traditions

• “Kostya” is Russian for “bones,” inspiring layered uses of nicknames throughout the novel.
  • “I thought it would be fun to play on that tradition in Russian literature, in Slavic literature, where there are many, many diminutives for a name.” (09:12 — Daria Lavelle)
• Frankie, Kostya’s roommate, dubs him “Bones”—a nod to both language and character relationships.

7. Frankie and Maura: Secondary Characters

• Frankie: Kostya’s charismatic chef roommate; brings energy and connection to the world of culinary artistry.
  • “He is just effervescent… the kind of person who, if you were to party with him, he would be the center of the room.” (11:19 — Daria Lavelle)
• Maura Elizabeth Struck: Initially presented as a "party psychic," she is deeply wary of Kostya’s ghostly gift and holds complex connections to the spirit world.
  • “She shuts him down pretty immediately. She’s like, this is a terrible idea. …Don’t feed them, don’t mess with them. Leave it alone.” (12:08 — Daria Lavelle)

8. Central Themes: Longing, Closure, and the Restaurant Dream

• Kostya’s motive for harnessing his supernatural ability: to see his father again and apologize.
  • “Maybe I can see my dad again. Maybe I can get the closure that I never got all those years ago as a child.” (15:13 — Daria Lavelle)
• His path evolves toward helping others find closure—in life and death.
• Launching a restaurant becomes possible when a shady Russian businessman offers full financial backing, in exchange for less savory influence.
  • “It’s very much a Faustian bargain…[the terms] are pretty nefarious.” (16:45 — Daria Lavelle)

9. Palate vs. Training in Haute Cuisine

• Kostya’s supernatural “palate” compensates for his lack of traditional chef training. Years of ghostly aftertastes have made him uniquely sensitive to the optimal versions of countless dishes.
  • “His palate is almost like a chameleon palate that takes on exactly what the spirit needs to eat and the way that it tastes.” (18:44 — Daria Lavelle)

10. Writing Craft and Favorite Scenes

• Daria researched NYC’s distinct ethnic neighborhoods and markets to bring the full breadth of world cuisines to life within Kostya’s restaurant.
  • “Most of the places you can actually go to and visit and you can shop for the same ingredients I talk about…” (21:29 — Daria Lavelle)
• Her favorite scene: Kostya’s creation of the “spectral sour” cocktail and his first spirit restoration at a bar.
  • “That was a powerful scene, too. That was truly moving.” (22:27 — GP Gottlieb)

11. Future Work

• Daria hints her next novel is a historical/fantastical love story set aboard an enchanted ship spanning a century, featuring lovers who can meet only one day each year. (22:39)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Grief and Later-Life Closure:

  “I can apologize. I can alleviate some of that grief and that guilt that I’ve been feeling.”
  (15:13 — Daria Lavelle)

• On the Gift of Aftertaste:

  “He’s able to figure out exactly what goes in a dish and how much… but he has to learn how to, like, braise or boil or saute or sous vide…”
  (18:44 — Daria Lavelle)

• On Researching Food in NYC:

  “That scene required so much research, not only into sort of the different cuisines, but also, like, where to shop for them in Manhattan.”
  (20:56 — Daria Lavelle)

• Host’s Response to Emotional Resonance:

  “That was a powerful scene, too. That was truly moving.”
  (22:27 — GP Gottlieb)

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Key Segments & Timestamps

• [03:00] — Daria’s family and food background
• [04:29] — The tasting game & food as memory
• [06:10] — Kostya’s guilt over his father’s death
• [07:15] — The aftertaste phenomenon explained
• [08:14] — Vera’s struggle with grief
• [09:12] — Russian names and the “Bones” nickname
• [11:19] — Frankie’s role as roommate and chef
• [12:08] — Maura’s introduction and warnings
• [15:13] — Closure, longing, and the father-son dynamic
• [16:45] — The Faustian bargain of running a restaurant
• [18:44] — The training of a supernatural palate
• [20:56] — Writing, research, and scene favorites
• [22:39] — Preview of Daria’s next novel

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains a warm, engaging, and reflective tone—balancing the wonder of magical realism with the poignant aches of family loss and personal growth. Both host and guest share a clear enthusiasm for the minutiae of cooking, the power of memory, and the life of a debut novelist.

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Listeners who haven’t read or listened will gain a vivid picture of both Aftertaste’s narrative and its emotional themes, as well as a strong sense of Daria Lavelle’s voice, background, and literary ambitions.

Transcript

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[Daria Lavelle]

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[Daria Lavelle]

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[Daria Lavelle]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[GP Gottlieb]

The first time Constantine Dehoveny tasted something he hadn't actually eaten, he was 11, seated on the edge of the public pool in Brighton beach, his heels turning gray water into foam. He was watching the backs of the other boys, the ones he was supposed to be swimming with but who never invited him, even out of politeness, into their circle as they splashed about, showing off handstands and lung capacities, spouting chlorinated water of food into the air like porpoises. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, and today I'm talking to Daria Lavelle about her novel Aftertaste. Konstantin Dahovny is young when he loses his father, and he doesn't know what to make of the strange taste in his mouth from a dish he'd never eaten called Pachanka. It was his father's favorite food, and it involved chicken livers, sauteed onion, dill and lemon. At first he's comforted, but then he's tasting other flavors, and he realizes that they're from ghosts needing to be let go by Living loved ones. Then a beautiful psychic warns him to stop. And all Kostya can think about is finding her again. Hi, Daria. Thanks for joining me.

[Daria Lavelle]

Thank you so much for having me.

[GP Gottlieb]

So Aftertaste is, among other things, a ghost story, but it's also about foodies who eat the most rare and refined food. What's your personal connection to food?

[Daria Lavelle]

Yeah, so I was fortunate to grow up in a really foodie family. So my family is Ukrainian. We emigrated from Ukraine when I was 2. And so Ukrainian food and cooking everything from scratch were just sort of staples in my household. My parents would make everything, like, everything, everything from scratch, from making their own farmer's cheese to curing salmon, to pickling pickles. And all of that stuff was just natural to me growing up. So I really had this amazing culinary education just without even leaving my house. And then as I got older, I got really interested in cooking shows, in cuisine, in getting to explore, you know, the world, basically through food. I would eat anything that I was able to kind of get my hands on that was different and new. And over my adult life, I've traveled and had the opportunity to eat in a lot of really amazing restaurants. And so all of that went into kind of feeding the Aftertaste storyline. In addition to that, I have an older cousin who's actually a professional New York City chef. And so I got to watch his experience coming up as a sous chef, going to culinary school, all of that, and so that certainly played a role as well.

[GP Gottlieb]

Wow. I'm sorry. I didn't know that before I read the book, because I was thinking, what did she do? How did she learn all this? Kostia, your protagonist, remembers his late father playing a tasting game with him. Can you talk about that game and tell me, just between you and me, did you play that game in your house?

[Daria Lavelle]

Yeah. So the game that he and his father play is sort of like a guess, guess what I'm feeding you. So Kostya would close his eyes and open his mouth, and his dad would put in a surprise something. It could have been a sardine. It could have been a, you know, pickled cabbage. It could have been a chocolate. He doesn't know. And the. The object of the game is to correctly guess what he's.

And in the context of Aftertaste, that was a way for them to continue to remember the food that they ate in Ukraine and kind of have a connection to his home country through food. Once they emigrated, when I was a kid, we never played that specifically, but I have so many Memories of as my parents were cooking, going into the kitchen and with my little hands, sneaking something and tasting it as they were in process. And just knowing every time you taste something, it brings you back to a particular moment. I think we all experience that in our lives. And I thought that was such a charged way to kind of create connection and to make a game out of it. Just felt very like the kind of thing that a father and a child would do together.

[GP Gottlieb]

Both you and your protagonist are very adventuresome eaters then. Because I remember my kids not eating things that weren't white, you know?

[Daria Lavelle]

Oh, yeah. From the time I was very little, I was eating things that I think are probably pretty exotic. Like I was 2, and I loved olives and pickles and sparkling water. Like all sorts of things kids usually standing from.

[GP Gottlieb]

So we learn early on that Kostya fought with his father on the day his father was accidentally killed. It's something that plagues him forever. Can you say more? Yeah.

[Daria Lavelle]

So they basically have a kind of childish argument. So Kostya really wants him to play this tasting game with him. And his father has to run out to work. He works as a driver for the mta and he has a new shift, a new route, and he's running late. And so Kostya gets frustrated and kind of tells him in the way that an 11 year old would kind of go to hell. And he sort of just says it. It just comes out as this moment of anger. He doesn't mean anything by it, but that's kind of the last thing he ever says to his dad. And so in the context of that, it serves as this sort of anchor and this reason for why, following his father's death, Kostia can't seem to move on from it. He can't move past it. That's kind of the way that the novel starts and unfolds. He's in this constant state of being stuck in his grief and mired by it and not being able to move past her through the guilt that he feels.

[GP Gottlieb]

And then he gets. Starts getting the aftertastes, and he feels like they're messages from his father. But what is he supposed to think? How else could he have thought?

[Daria Lavelle]

Yeah, I mean, they show up. So the aftertastes are these tastes, these flavors just appear in his mouth kind of magically, psychically. He experiences them for a moment, and it's not like a brief glimpse of something, it's a full meal, a full experience of eating something, and all of a sudden it vanishes. And he comes to Understand that these are being sent to him by the spirits. The afterlife, the very first one he experiences happens to be his father's favorite meal. And so he automatically makes that connection. He says, wait a minute. In this moment that I'm missing my dad most terribly, all of a sudden his favorite dish, which I've never eaten, appears in my mouth. And I know instantly what it is. This has to be some sort of sign. But he pretty quickly learns that he's got to hide it from people. Otherwise, you know, no one takes him seriously. And people think he's kind of gone insane in his grief. As a result.

[GP Gottlieb]

We know that his mom is pretty superstitious. And we know that in Kostya's opinion, she did not step up as a mother. Will you say a bit about her, about Vera?

[Daria Lavelle]

Sure. So the relationship between Vera and Sergey, who's Kostya's father, and Vera and Kostya kind of hinges on the loss of Sergey. So after he dies, Kostya kind of has to, as an 11 year old child, step into this role of becoming all of a sudden adult, his mother. And she has reasons for it. I won't reveal what they are, you find out kind of later on in the book. But she basically is entangled in her own loss and it affects her so profoundly that she can't even bring herself to take care of her child. So Kostya kind of winds up being the adult. He's the one who has to apply for food stamps for them. He's the one who has to go grocery shopping. He's the one who has to kind of keep the lights on and make things work. And.

As a result, his relationship with his mother almost completely deteriorates by the time he's an adult.

[GP Gottlieb]

How did Kostya get the nickname Bones?

[Daria Lavelle]

So that's actually an etymologically.

Accurate thing. So in Russian, Kostya means bones. And so I thought one of the things that I tried to do is hide lots of Easter eggs in this book. And so I thought it would be fun to play on that tradition in Russian literature, in Slavic literature, where there are many, many diminutives for a name. So if you've ever read Dostoevsky or Nabokov, you have all of these nicknames for kind of traditional Russian names. So Natasha could be a nickname for Natalia, but it could also be Natka or Nata, depending on who you're talking to. And so I wanted Konstantin to have lots of these nicknames that are representative of his relationships with different people. And so Frankie, his roommate, is the one who calls him Bones. And that comes from my imagined scene where he's introducing himself to Frankie for the first time. And Frankie's like. Constantine has a lot to say. Like, what else do you go by? And he says, well, I go by Kostya. And he's like, nah, I can't say that either. And he goes, well, that means Bones. And so that becomes the nickname between them.

[GP Gottlieb]

How did Kostya figure out that ghosts are leaving flavors in his mouth?

[Daria Lavelle]

I think for him, it was a combination of a couple of things. I think it was instinctual. So I think as soon as he experienced that very first aftertaste, that was the liver dish that his father loved, he immediately knew that it was a connection to the other side and food was the kind of way forward. And then as he experienced more and more of these aftertastes, they were constant, constant onslaught in his mouth, he began to piece together. These aren't all from my dad. These are cuisines that he certainly never tried. These are foods he never ate. But they're all kind of loaded with some significance. They must be coming from other people. And then when he finally attempts in his 30s, to prepare one of these dishes in this sort of interesting, coincidental, maybe faded way, he discovers that by cooking this food, he can actually bring a spirit back from the afterlife for a last meal. And so at that point, it sort of confirms his suspicions.

[GP Gottlieb]

I should have asked you about Frankie when you brought him up. Can you say more about him?

[Daria Lavelle]

So Frankie is probably my favorite character to write. Don't tell the others.

He is just effervescent. He is the kind of person who, if you were to party with him, he would be the center of the room, and everybody would be waiting to talk to him. He is just exciting and fun and charismatic, and he is a chef. He's very much on the rise as we meet him in the context of the story. He and Kostya meets for a roommate ad on Craigslist, and they kind of hit it off and become best friends. And Frankie kind of takes Kostya under his wing once he decides to follow the aftertastes and attempt to open a New York City restaurant. Ah.

[GP Gottlieb]

So now will you introduce Mara Elizabeth Struck?

[Daria Lavelle]

Maura is. She is Kostya's love interest in this book, but she's so much more than that. I didn't want her to just live on this superficial level. So she has a lot of sort of depth and demons, I'll say, in terms of writing a character, she's kind of like the Iceberg character. What we see is kind of the tip of her personality that she wants us to see, but there's so much more going on that gets revealed later on in the book once we start to shift into her perspective and see things from her eyes. So when we first meet her, she's working as a party psychic for this underground club in Brooklyn and Kostya wanders into her tent having just discovered his ability to resurrect spirits, and he sort of is looking for some spiritual guidance and she shuts him down pretty immediately. She's like, this is a terrible idea. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Stay away from ghosts. Don't feed them, don't mess with them. Leave it alone. Which of course he chooses to ignore that good advice. But we learn throughout the story that they're there are good reasons why she's recommending that, and she has a lot of sort of her her own experiences with death and the afterlife that inform all of her perspectives on it.

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[GP Gottlieb]

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[Daria Lavelle]

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[GP Gottlieb]

Write quote every minute he spent at the restaurant Each time he learned a new cooking method or honed a new skill, Kostya could almost feel. Feel the possibility of seeing his dad draw near. What can you say about Kostya's longing for his father who died years ago now?

[Daria Lavelle]

Yeah, I think that's the driving force that initially leads Kostya to want to pursue these aftertastes for the first time. So the way the story is set up, he loses his father. A year later, he experiences that first aftertaste, and then he has them for about 20 years before he decides to act on them or address them in any way. And it's only when he discovers that cooking this food can actually bring a spirit back that all of a sudden he says, wait a minute. Maybe I can see my dad again. Maybe I can get the closure that I never got all those years ago as a child. I can apologize. I can alleviate some of that grief and that guilt that I've been feeling. And so he initially sets out almost for a selfish reason. He wants to learn about these aftertastes and discover his talents in order to bring his dad back. And pretty quickly, once he's successfully done this a few times, he learns that there are a lot of people who are looking for closure and need that kind of connection that he's craving, too. And so it becomes as much about helping others and sort of helping other people get that closure and alleviate the grief that he hasn't been able to do in his own life. So his dad kind of serves as this driving force. And it's only when he meets Maura and begins to fall in love with her that he. He starts living for life as much as he's been living for death.

[GP Gottlieb]

Yeah. What can you say about the offer to run his own restaurant? Money being no object.

[Daria Lavelle]

So this is sort of like the restaurant dream. But of course, it's like, very much a Faustian bargain. So Kostya gets involved with this shady Russian businessman named Victoria, who just kind of offers him the moon on a platter and says, yeah, I'm intrigued by this idea. We can make this work. This seems like something people will be really into. And it's money is no object. I'll fund your restaurant. Just let me make certain choices, like where it's going to be and who gets to eat there and what the pricing is going to be, but you can have your own restaurant. And so Kostya kind of jumps in feet first because he wants so badly to offer closure to others, to have the chance to see his own dad again, to do what he thinks is really genuinely the right thing by these spirits and by the living people who are missing them. And we learn, like, we, as the reader, probably surmise this much earlier than Constantine, because I think he just doesn't want to see it, and so he doesn't see it. But we learn that the terms of the restaurant are pretty nefarious. And so that begins to be one of the things that piles up in the big grand finale, which I won't ruin. But as things continue getting worse, that's one of the factors at play.

[GP Gottlieb]

Oh, we, as the reader, we can tell that he's a bad guy.

[Daria Lavelle]

There's no question about it.

[GP Gottlieb]

Kostia doesn't have any culinary training. That's the thing that kept coming up. But he feels like decades of ghost tasting have trained his tongue more than any culinary school. I have two questions. First of all, how'd you come up with that? And second, you know, when you think of the refined world of high cuisine and how the chefs in that world behave and how important.

Their studies are and who they trained with, so how did you make all that come together?

[Daria Lavelle]

Sure. So I think there's a couple of different things. When you talk about cooking, especially when you talk about fine dining, you talk about palate. And so you have to do what's called training your palate. You have to kind of taste enough things, taste enough of your own cooking, be consistent enough where you know, how much salt is the right amount of salt, how much pepper is the right amount of pepper? Is something supposed to have an acid here where you have a fat? Cause it's not balanced? And so all of that really comes from palate training and tasting a lot of things and also learning your own palate. Like, what is pleasing to my palate might be totally different than what is pleasing to yours. And so in Constantine's case, because he's experienced hundreds of thousands of dishes that are all from completely different cuisines, completely different backgrounds, he's attuned to figure out the way that something should taste correctly to the person it's intended for. So his palate is almost like a chameleon palate that takes on exactly what the spirit needs to eat and the way that it tastes. And so that, to me, was really important in kind of developing his gift and also in developing his culinary ability, because what he needs to learn is less what to cook and more how to cook. So he doesn't have technique, but he has this inherent palate ability. And so he's able to figure out exactly what goes in a dish and how much. And through tasting and refining, add just the right amount of the ingredients that he knows are in it. But he has to learn how to, like, braise or boil or saute or sous vide, you know, to properly prepare something.

[GP Gottlieb]

So my favorite scene in the whole book was when. Was when he was supplying every single possible cuisine in the world for his restaurant. And the idea of it. I know how hard it is to go shopping just for, like, a dinner. So he had to have a little bit of every single kind of animal and every single kind of fish and every kind of dairy and every kind of how. That must have been a fun scene to write. I'm wondering if that was one of your faves or if you have another one. Another scene.

[Daria Lavelle]

I did love writing that scene. That scene required so much research, not only into sort of the different cuisines, but also, like, where to shop for them in Manhattan. And what are the specific places where you can actually find some of these foods? Because one of the things that I tried to do in Aftertaste was create verisimilitude, where you actually. Most of the places that are mentioned, with a handful of exceptions that are thinly veiled approximations of places, but most of the places you can actually go to and visit and you can shop for the same ingredients I talk about in the places.

[GP Gottlieb]

Wow.

[Daria Lavelle]

And so that was a lot of research, a lot of figuring out what are the core flavor profiles of different cuisines, and where would you find these cuisines in the context of Manhattan? Because there are all of these little pockets where.

Different types of food and different types of restaurants will kind of cluster together. So that was a really fun experience to think about. I'm sure I did not even come close to getting all of the niches and the.

Micro communities of food that exist in Manhattan. But I did my best to get enough of them in where you can kind of like get an idea in your head of just how much he needs to cover every base possible in a city like New York. So that was a really fun one. I think my favorite scene, though, is probably the spectral, sour scene where Kostya is working at the cocktail bar, and he creates a cocktail for the first time, and he restorations for the first time.

[GP Gottlieb]

That was a powerful scene, too. That was truly moving.

So, Daria, fabulous. Really a wonderful book. What are you working on next?

[Daria Lavelle]

So I am working on another speculative fiction novel. That's always what you'll find. For me, it is very different from Aftertaste. It is a sort of historical speculative fiction. It starts in 1899 in San Francisco. It is about a woman who falls in love with a sailor on an enchanted ship, and they can only be together for one day a year over the course of a hundred years. And so it's the question of will their love last for that long, given the way the world can change in a hundred years.

[GP Gottlieb]

There's an opera, a Wagner opera. I think about that. Similar. I'm excited. Keep me posted. Thank you so much, Daria Lavelle, for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

[Daria Lavelle]

It's been such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you again for having me.

[GP Gottlieb]

And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series and host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I've been talking to Daria Lavelle, author of Aftertaste. Hope you all have something sneaky and kind of scary to read today.

[Narrator/Promoter]

And always happy reading, Sam.