The underlying messaging that grated on me And the underlying morale of the four stories is basically highly conservative in my opinion. 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?ĭespite a tantalizing premise the execution of time travel with ever added on new rules is sloppy.

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.īut 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. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Read the rest of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series:What would you change if you could go back in time? Meet more wonderful characters in the next captivating novel in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Before We Say Goodbye, releasing November 14, 2023! Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time? Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee-the chance to travel back in time. In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?

Before the coffee get cold