Ratings226
Average rating3.7
What would you change if you could go 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. 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 – translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot – 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?
Featured Series
4 primary booksコーヒーが冷めないうちに is a 4-book series with 4 primary works first released in 2015 with contributions by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and Geoffrey Trousselot.
Reviews with the most likes.
This book was delightful. I read it because someone in my feed gave it a good rating, and it turned out to be the magical realism I needed right now. I'm looking forward to reading book #2. (Everything else I wanted to say was a spoiler!)
This book was heartwarming and bittersweet.
'...no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to overcome them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone's heart, it clearly has it's purpose.'
Couldn't handle the writing style. Stating the obvious, telling me the same thing three times, etc.
There is nobody I would want to see badly enough to go through this many rules of time travel.
Featured Prompt
49 booksI'm at 42/52 and I'm trying to really make a push to finish the year! I have a few longer books (18–25 hours audiobook) lined up, so I want some shorter and easier ones to fill out the list. I tend...