Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Book 1
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3 Months Free
Buy Now for £9.33
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Narrated by:
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Arina Ii
The cosy, heartwarming first book in the multi-million copy bestselling series.
What would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese, explores this age-old question . . .
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
- 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, Before We Forget Kindness and Before I knew I loved you.
Critic reviews
Beautiful
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A café in Tokyo offers customers an opportunity to travel in time with some conditions: you have to remain in your seat, you can only meet with someone who's been to the cafe, you cannot change the present. However, the most important rule is you have to return to the present before the coffee gets cold.
- A book I recently read (The Kamogawa Food Detectives) is frequently compared to this book and I can. see the similarities. Similar vibes are involved and a sense of longing, bittersweet emotions and the processes of decisions and actions made. I personally preferred the way The Kamogawa Food Detectives handled this but Before the Coffee Gets Cold touched me too.
- The topics are sensitive. There are stories featuring lovers facing separation, a wife who's husband has dementia, a woman wanting a final chance to make amends with her dead sister and a pregnant woman facing a difficult situation. I liked how the book wasn't all happy endings but that the resolutions made sense and elicited feelings. I would recommend checking out content warnings if you are sensitive to themes of medical issues and/or grief.
- The cafe itself was fun to imagine. This basement space with a table almost exclusively occupied by a ghost and clocks showing different times. The staff made the cafe more alive, with different and interesting characters. I'm looking forward to hearing what happens to them in the rest of the series.
A sad but cosy book. If you want a book that feels bittersweet, can help you cry or to enjoy some magical realism, Before the Coffee Gets Cold may be for you.
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Great stories with wisdom to follow upon
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Gentle story and thought provoking too, enjoyed it
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A story about human connection
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