Before the Coffee Gets Cold

A Novel

272 pages

English language

Published Jan. 7, 2021

ISBN:
978-1-335-47478-0
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3 stars (7 reviews)

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

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?

5 editions

Why cat on cover if not cat in story...

3 stars

But I digress. This book was alright. I'm not sure if it was just the translator's doing or if it's how it was originally written, but with what should be some heavy moments, it just felt devoid of emotions. This comes across as a cozy book but I've read other cozy books that still have emotional topics that allow you to feel those emotions while still feeling it's a cozy read.

I was sucked into it at first because the premise of it was so interesting and refreshing. You can travel forward or backward in time for as long as the freshly poured coffee is warm, cannot have any influence on what has already happened, and the chair that you must use is only available for a short period of time once a day because it's occupied by a ghost lady until she needs to use the bathroom. Which, I …

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rated it

3 stars