Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Books | Fiction / Literary

3.8

(2.6K)

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

One of the most popular Booktok books on Tiktok in 2022In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café's time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold ... Toshikazu Kawaguchi's beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

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More Details:

Author

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Pages

300

Publisher

Pan Macmillan UK

Published Date

2019-09-24

ISBN

1760788627 9781760788629

Community ReviewsSee all

"I found this to be a very serene and somewhat melancholic read. Arguably also too short (though I loved the ending!) but being that it's part of a trilogy, there is more to be read. The one complaint I'd have is not being super into the writing style but it's translated so I cant hold it against the author/book. "

Mare

"Bittersweet little book. Strange but cute..I wasn't so sure that I liked the end, but after thinking about it, I guess it was fitting...especially since this was a play. "

Nena Colunga

"Written wonderfully - easy to tell that the author is a playwrite! I could picture everything so vividly as if it were being performed. I cried so hard while reading at one point that I could not even see the words and had to stop. What a poignant depiction of grief, longing, and loss. "

Alexia Hollis

"4,5/5 This book was so sweet and sentimental and so sad at some parts, like oh my god, Chapter 2 can we take a moment ughhh had me sobbing. I love the concept of the whole thing. It's very cozy and magical and so original the characters were all very likable. You follow different characters in each chapter, but they all Carryon into each other's stories which makes the whole overall story fall into place cohesively. I think you could take a lot of life lessons from all the stories. They can make you feel a certain way about the experience you've had or are going to have potentiality have and might make you look at things differently, which I love when a book can do that when you can take away something within all the stories. The writing was so amazing it made the atmosphere all the better. I could imagine everything so vividly."

Gizelle Villalta

"This is the second Japanese fiction book I have picked up simply because of intriguing cat covers. I'm going to keep picking them up too because this book was fantastic! "

Elise Meyers

"This is a really beautiful story- I sometimes love to read a book without knowing anything about it, if I’m just drawn in my the artwork or an interesting title.. this one is a beautiful cover artwork and I practically have coffee running thru my veins - so of course, I thought this title was really interesting - more importantly, the story left me ruminating on so many “what ifs” on my own life and if I could see many people again what I might say to them… and how many chapters were abruptly ended in some stories of my life.. This story was very well written and thought provoking and I highly recommend. I believe there is a sequel to this coming out and I will be so happy to read that as well 😇"

🪴WILLOW🪴

"3.5/5 !! It was mediocre. It didn't necessarily stand out to me, but it was definitely a really good book. The idea was genius and they followed a steady plot. There were just so many characters and it got confusing after a while. Maybe not worth $20, but if you find this at a library or something I would read it. :) Also, justice for the lady in the seat !!"

kayla 🌷

"I found the aesthetic, the world building and the stories within this book to be very good. I throughly enjoyed the different perspective that is taken on the subject of time travel. It is done in such a unique way that it is the books strong point. Although I feel that the first story of the book stuffers because of all the world building the book has to create and all the characters the book throws at you but the rest of the stories thrive off of that. "

Laine

"I love it"

Emilly Adeline やあ

"7.5/10- this book was really different than what I normally read, but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a compilation of short stories that all tie together, and some of them are really sweet but heartbreaking at the same time. It’s translated from Japanese, so I think cultural differences made this book a little bit difficult to follow, but i was still able to enjoy it. "