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.īut 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. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. This wondrous tale will move readers.One of the most popular Booktok books on Tiktok in 2022 'An affecting, deeply immersive journey into the desire to hold onto the past. This charmingly magical novel is about discovering happiness despite the pasts that we desperately want to revisit.' - The Harvard Crimson 'Toshikazu lays out a system of time travel that is unconvoluted and beautifully simple. Check out Kawaguchi's work if you fancy a break from the inescapable reality of the pandemic.' - The Mancunion 'Before the Coffee Gets Cold is able to create pathos for the characters who yearn in earnest to change the past. 'The story is gold. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is perfect for anyone who wants to feel connected right now.' - BookReporter Kawaguchi builds suspense from scene to scene, carefully selecting his narrative clues.' - The Arts Fuse 'By cleverly weaving fantastic strands into what turns out to be an entertaining tale.

Interwoven into what initially feels like a whimsical escape are existential conundrums of love and loss, family and freedom, life and death.' - The Christian Science Monitor

has a surprising, unerring ability to find lasting emotional resonance. 'A charming novel about a mysterious Japanese coffee shop in which customers who sit in a certain chair can go back in time - but just while their coffee is cooling.' - Star Tribune 'Heartwarming, quirky, and wistful.' - Huffpost the narrative is deeply moving.' - Chicago Review of Books But more than that, what I really enjoyed was reading the backstories of the characters. may explore similar ground to its predecessors in the genre, but it inventively limits the mechanics of its time travel to the confines of a small cafe, and is all the more resonant for it. 4/5: I love the premise of this book: a café that allows someone to travel in time (with very strict rules, as not being able to change the present, no matter how hard you try).

Before the coffee gets cold genre