Before the Coffee Gets Cold

hardcover, 240 pages

Published Nov. 17, 2020 by Hanover Square Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-335-43099-1

(2 reviews)

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 …

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 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?

6 editions

emmadilemma reviewed Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Small and profound

5 stars

Before the Coffee Gets Cold was nothing like the other books in my TBR pile. Tiny and softspoken, entombed in a cacophony of big-mouthed, big-font hardbacks, it waited its turn and made itself known gently but poignantly.

You may have read that this book involves time travel, but really only in the same way that The Lord of the Rings was about a ring. It's about people, humanity really. For me to try to explain better is to waste words. This is not my kind of book. But it is now.

René reviewed Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

So good you’ll forget to finish your coffee before it gets cold

5 stars

I found the first story a bit slow, it took a bit of time to explain the rules so I wasn’t too sure I’d like it. Everything changed (to me) from the second story onwards.