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Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Written by: Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Geoffrey Trousselot - translator
Narrated by: Arina Ii
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₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹323.00

Buy Now for ₹323.00

About this listen

The first book in the multi-million copy bestselling series about a cosy Japanese cafe that offers its visitors the chance to travel back in time.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s heart-warming Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese, 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 cosy 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.

Prepare to 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 . . .

‘This book broke my heart, took the pieces, and put them back together in a messy and beautiful way. . . '
-@well.read.woman on Instagram

Continue the beautifully moving storytelling with Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades, Before We Say Goodbye and Before We Forget Kindness.

©2019 Toshikazu Kawaguchi (P)2019 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd City Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism Science Fiction Time Travel Urban World Literature
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A very simplistic perspective on the reasons people want to time travel. If you want a casual read, this is a nice book.

A sweet and simple read.

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I loved the narration and the beautiful story! it's a beautiful story and the way it has been narrated is absolutely amazing! Great work!

Absolutely loved it

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I picked up this book because of its intriguing plot around time travel and also hoping to read more on Japanese life - after being swayed by Pachinko. While the book didn't do justice to touching on Japanese culture or life, the time travel bit of the story was decent.

I liked the way the author simplified the rules of time travel and focused on how it might impact you rather than changing anything else. It touched upon how letting go or accepting things can lead to so much positivity to your future. The story dealt with loss, relationship, hope, anxiety and it packaged everything quite well especially using a twist of time travel. Some parts like repeated apparation for the time travel could have been avoided to make it more crisp, but all in all a decent one time read. The Audible experience was really good.

An interesting take on time travel

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Plodding. Predictable. A wonderful concept terribly executed.

'Before the Coffee Gets Cold' by Toshikazu Kawaguchi tells the story of a café which possesses a special ability - it allows its' customers to travel back in time to the past, but there are several caveats. Most notably - you cannot leave the booth you are sitting at in the café when you travel to the past, you return back to the present when the coffee you are served gets cold - and no matter what you do, the present does not change.

Now this in itself is an intriguing premise. And we get to see the powers of this time travelling seat exercise itself in four very personal stories - that of Fumiko, a businesswoman trying to repair her relationship with her boyfriend, Kohtake, a nurse whose Alzheimer's ridden husband is in her care and who longs to visit her husband in the past, Hirai, a bar owner who is in a struggling relationship with her family, and Kei, a pregnant woman looking for reassurance on the good fate of her unborn child.

I wanted to like this book - but it was just so painfully slow. It would have served better as a 50 page novella rather than a 200 odd page book - and the end result is an unnecessarily bloated novel that takes away from its' own core message. Furthermore, the author barely tries to get the readers to empathize with his characters and so much time is wasted on mind-numbing prose that serves no purpose but to slow everything down so that there are more pages.

Side note: If I had a nickel for every time the phrase "[A] looked [B] directly in the eyes" was used in this book - I'd be a millionaire.

From a story standpoint, only Hirai's came off as mildly engaging and relatable. The other three were just below-average saccharine sludge.

To conclude, it's possible that something may have been lost in translation - or that this book was maybe targeted for a much, much younger teenage audience - but I don't see myself recommending this to anyone but pre-teens looking for a harmless book to kickstart a reading habit.

2.5 stars.

Plodding. Predictable.

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Loved the book. The narration was good Hooked from start to finish. Enjoyed it.

Enjoyable book

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