Aftertaste is an extraordinary novel which encompasses so many genres. It’s a ghost story, a love story, part science fiction but also with a mystery/suspense element. It’s also about food and loss and how sometimes the taste of something can bring up a memory of someone who has passed. It also explores how love can change a person as well as what someone in love would do for the person they love.
Kostya Duhovny’s father tragically dies when he is ten years old. It changes his life forever. His mother checks out of life and lays in bed, Kostya at his young age must fend for himself, sometimes barely eating and being constantly bullied by the other children.
One day when he goes to the local pool, he begins to get this sensation in his mouth of a particular food he and his father use to make together. He becomes aware that perhaps his father is trying to tell him something, but what? He can’t imagine.
Years go by and Kostya begins to get use to this sensation of taste. Always different, never the one he got from his father. Unable to understand why this is happening, waiting for something else to push him to what he needs to know, he continues with life and its struggles. And he truly struggles.
Until one-night years later when he is a bus boy at a bar and someone comes in, and he begins to get the taste for a particular drink. Kostya decides to make the drink and serve it to the person who has just come in. And then he knows what he is supposed to be doing with this gift. He is to reunite the dead with a person they are missing so they can have one last conversation.
Of course, needless to say this does not go over so well when he decides to start his own restaurant! When something happens to his best (and only) friend, he is devastated, but his aftertaste draws him to a girl. Someone whose sister has passed. While trying to help her, they fall in love.
But unbeknownst to either of them there are problems with this gift and the afterlife. Kostya gets himself in trouble in the present but also begins to cause havoc in life after death. Now unfortunately he is the only one who can stop this train wreck his life is on and the trajectory of the afterlife.
Aftertaste is a heartwarming tale with so much love and loss but yet beautiful in a way that cannot be described unless you read this moving, delicious story.
Published by Simon & Schuster
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