Before the Coffee Gets Cold
As seen:
By Toshikazu Kawaguchi, and and, Geoffrey Trousselot
avg rating
3 reviews
The million-copy bestselling series about a cosy Japanese cafe that offers its visitors the chance to travel back in time.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s heart-warming Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
In a cosy 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.
Prepare to 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 Alzheimer’s
- see their sister one last time, and
- 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 . . .
‘This book broke my heart, took the pieces, and put them back together in a messy and beautiful way. . . ’
-@well.read.woman on Instagram
Continue the beautifully moving storytelling with Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye and Before We Forget Kindness.
TweetReviews
Cute book, sweet connections
Translated fiction. Such interesting vocab choices-wonderful for lit in translation discussions for IB!
A beautifully written treasure of a book which touches your soul. It combines the tantalising prospect of time travel with some very clever and moving twists. I was hooked from start to finish and felt myself becoming intertwined with the characters who thread through the four linked chapters. I could picture myself with them in the little basement cafe at every turn - holding my breath with them, hoping with them, marvelling at their courage and celebrating their awakenings. Stunning!!
