Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The heart-warming million-copy sensation from Japan
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4.0 • 181 Ratings
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
The million-copy bestselling series about a small Japanese cafe that offers its visitors the chance to travel back in time.
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s moving Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, 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 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 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 . . .
Continue the beautiful storytelling with Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye and Before We Forget Kindness - all out now!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japanese playwright Kawaguchi's evocative English-language debut is set in a tiny Tokyo caf where time travel is possible. In four connected tales, lovers and family members take turns sitting in the chair that allows a person to travel back in time for only as long as it takes a single cup of coffee to cool. In "Husband and Wife," a nurse goes back in time to visit her husband before his Alzheimer's erased her from his memory; in "The Sisters," a woman visits her younger sister, who died in an accident while trying to visit her, to apologize for not seeing her. Kawaguchi's characters embark on lo-fi, emotional journeys unburdened by the technicalities often found in time travel fiction notably, they are unable to change the present. The characters learn, though, that even though people don't return to a changed present, they return "with a changed heart." Kawaguchi's tender look at the beauty of passing things, adapted from one of his plays, makes for an affecting, deeply immersive journey into the desire to hold onto the past. This wondrous tale will move readers.
Customer Reviews
I’m not sure
Maybe I didn’t understand the depth and spirituality of this book.
beautiful
i adore this book
Not the first book in the new year
This is the first book I read in the new year, and would advise against doing the same. It maybe just so that the book was so highly praised that I had set extremely high expectations. It’s a short brief read that seems repetitive (not in a good way). The titular phrase was repeated so much that I wanted to throw away my cup of coffee. I do believe some of the beauty maybe be lost in translation.