Latest news with #Aftertaste
Irish Examiner
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Beginner's pluck: Full-time writer and mother Daria Lavelle
From a creative family, literature has always played a large part in Daria's life. 'I was an imaginative child,' she says. 'I invented stories and games, and at 15, I started writing seriously.' She won some teenage writing awards for short stories, and had a play performed when she was at college. 'From the start my writing had a speculative element, of fantasy and magic.' Daria worked in advertising as a brand strategist for 10 years, but she didn't stop writing. I continuously wrote novels. An agent sent out two YA novels, but they died. She started writing Aftertaste in 2019. 'It was my thesis project,' she says. 'During the MFA they matched students with agents. Lucy Carson showed great passion about the novel.' It has sold to 15 territories, and the movie rights sold to Sony. Who is Daria Lavelle? Date/ place of birth: 1987/ Kyiv, Ukraine. 'I was 2 when we emigrated.' Education: Public school in New Jersey; Princeton University, creative writing and comparative literature; Sarah Lawrence College, New York, MFA in fine arts in writing with a speculative fiction focus. Home: New Jersey. Family: Husband James, twins aged 7, and an 18-month-old. A golden Doodle, Stanley. The day job: Full-time writer and mother. In another life: 'Writing is something in my soul. But I'd love to experience film or TV.' Favourite writers: Karen Russell; Erin Morgenstern; Kelly Link; Amy Bender; Anthony Bourdain; VE Schwab; Jennifer Egan. Second book: 'I'm working on it.' Top tip: 'You have to build a whole world, with tools to help the reader immerse themselves in the novel.' Website: Instagram: @ The debut Aftertaste Bloomsbury, €17.99 While dishwashing in a restaurant, Kostya mixes a cocktail and discovers his ability to summon spirits through the food he cooks. Rising through the culinary ranks, he starts to connect the living with the dead through his cooking. But it's a dangerous game, that threatens the stability of the afterlife — not to mention Kostya's love life — with the psychic, Maura. Full of ghosts, and delectable food, this novel explores life, death, love, and friendship, but mostly the effects of grief, and the difficulty of finding closure. The verdict: A gourmet delight. Highly original and hugely evocative, it definitely tugs at the heartstrings.
Epoch Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Author Daria Lavelle's Novel ‘Aftertaste': Check Please
Depending on what you like in literature, 'Aftertaste' by Daria Lavelle is either a unique speculative culinary-lit experience or a wrong turn into a back alley New York bistro that was better left alone. Definitely an acquired taste. To be fair, it begins quite well. The story starts by following the childhood of Konstantin 'Kostya' Duhovny, a poor, awkward New York City kid who lost his Russian immigrant father at a very young age. His last words to his father were those of disgust and scorn; he tells his father the family should have stayed back in the old country where Kostya could've been a chef, instead of a pathetic bus driver in America.
Irish Independent
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Daria Lavelle: ‘There's just something about a character driven wholly by love that makes him indelible'
Born in Kyiv and raised near New York, Daria Lavelle is a writer of speculative fiction. Her short stories have been featured in various online publications, and her debut novel, Aftertaste – about a chef whose food brings spirits back for one last meal with their loved ones – has just been published by Bloomsbury.
NZ Herald
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle
Aftertaste follows Konstantin 'Kostya' Duhovny, a Ukrainian immigrant in the underbelly of New York City's bustling culinary scene. Kostya's journey begins with a haunting experience: at 11, he inexplicably conjures the taste of his deceased father's favourite dish, pechonka, without ever having eaten it. As an adult, Kostya discovers
Irish Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle: A brash novel about early 2000s New York that finds treasure in the trash
Aftertaste Author : Daria Lavelle ISBN-13 : 978-1526683946 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Ukrainian-American Daria Lavelle's debut novel is a tale of love, loss and horror set against the freakish backdrop of Manhattan's dining scene. Kostya is a chef who can taste the food dead people desire, which he re-creates for ghosts to share with the ones that mourn them. As with many underworld ventures, things go amiss. Already, Aftertaste has summoned quite a stir, with a movie in the works. There's Stephen King in this novel's ancestry, in style as well as scares. Like King, Lavelle is unabashed that her prose can be clumsy and cliched – 'orgasmic eating experience', 'the perfect, crispy crackle of golden fried chicken skin'. What matters is momentum. Lavelle's writing pounds with bada-boom dialogue and the kind of adrenaline found in an over-heated kitchen during service. In the way she uses brands and celebrities as descriptors, Lavelle evokes Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. About one Russian kingpin, she writes: 'While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle … his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him in an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking with too much cologne.' Just as Ellis never escapes the 1980s, Lavelle's New York, although purportedly present-day, is mired in the early aughts. Macho chefs and hidden speakeasies abound; the East Village is still cool, and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential very much alive. There's a banquet featuring ingredients that once upon a time might have induced gasps – the endangered songbird ortolan, the potentially lethal fugu fish. Kostya's love interest Maura is by-the-book retro, a manic-pixie dream girl with purple hair. READ MORE Is Afterlife sometimes sloppy and occasionally bad? Perhaps, but to read it is a rush. Besides, one should be suspicious of someone who disdains all junk, be it a McDonald's French fry or Real Housewives marathon. As an elegy to a city where garbage and greatness go hand in hand, it's only appropriate to find a little trash in Aftertaste's soul.
