Daria Lavelle Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Daria Lavelle is a successful American fiction writer.

She was originally born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in the New York metro area. A lot of her work goes into themes of identity and belonging through magic and the uncanny.

You may have seen her work before as her short stories have been featured in Dread Machine, The Deadlands, and elsewhere. She even holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College.

She resides in New Jersey along with her husband and children and goldendoodle. She says all of them enjoy a great meal nearly as much as she does.

Aftertaste is a 2025 novel by Daria Lavelle. If you have enjoyed works such as Under the Whispering Door or the high-stakes culinary world of Sweetbitter, you may enjoy this book. It is a dark comedy and an epic love story as well as a synesthetic adventure that takes people through food and grief.

What if it were possible to have a final meal with someone that you have loved and someone that you have lost? Konstantin Duhovny is a man who is haunted. His father passed away when he was ten years old, and ever since that point ghosts have been hovering around Kostya.

Kostya cannot really see the ghosts, but he is able to taste their favorite foods. He can tell when a ghost is around because flavors of meals that he has never actually consumed will come into his mouth, which is a sign that a spirit is there.

He calls them aftertastes, and Kostya has kept them a secret for the majority of his life. However, one night he chooses to act upon what he is tasting, and finds in the process that everything changes.

Kostya finds that he can reunite people with their loved ones who have departed, at least for the amount of time that it takes for them to consume a dish that he has made. He thinks that the purpose of his life might be to give closure to grieving strangers, so he goes out and tries to learn everything that he can by going into one of the most competitive places on Earth: the New York culinary scene.

However, as his kitchen skills are catching up to his ambitions, Kostya is finding that he is too blind to be able to see the catastrophe that is looming in the afterlife. There is only one other person out there who understands that Kostya has to be stopped and who also happens to be falling in love with him too.

Placed in the world of restaurants in New York and full of delicious food writing, this is a romance as well as a look at loss and love as well as a ghost story that is all about the ways that we are hungry as well as how much further that we would have to go in order to find satisfaction.

This debut is a multi-course tasting menu of a story that promises to have readers experience inspiration, excitement, delight, and more. Pick up a copy for yourself and read Daria Lavelle’s compelling debut to see what you think!