Cover art for Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Published
Picador, September 2019
ISBN
9781529029581
Format
Softcover, 224 pages
Dimensions
19.8cm × 13.1cm × 1.6cm

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe 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 cafe'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 cafe, 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?

Recommended by Cadence

If she’s not busy being the Specialist Non-Fiction and Children’s and Young Adult Boffin, you’ll find Cadence curled up with one of the four books she usually has on the go. Feel free to talk to her about ancient history, middle-grade fiction or fantasy reads!

Such a beautiful book! There's a café in Tokyo that lets you visit the past, but there are rules… I did not know what to expect but I was blown out of the water by the impact these characters had on me. It makes you muse what you would do with a second chance, and is short enough you can finish it before your coffee gets cold!

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