Before the Coffee Gets Cold: The heart-warming million-copy sensation from Japan
As seen:
By Toshikazu Kawaguchi, and and, Geoffrey Trousselot
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2 reviews
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, and Before We Say Goodbye.
Pre-order Book 5, Before We Forget Kindness, now!
TweetReviews
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!!
