Before the coffee gets cold : a novel

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Title:

Before the coffee gets cold : a novel

Author:

Kawaguchi, Toshikazu, 1971- author.

Trousselot, Geoffrey, translator.

Series:

Before the coffee gets cold ;

Series Number:

Summary:

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? -- Amazon.

General Note:

Originally published in Japanese in 2015 as Coffee Ga Samenai Uchimi by Sunmark Publishing, Inc., Tokyo, Japan. --Title page verso.

First published in 2019 in the United Kingsom by Picador ; This edition published in 2020. --Title page verso.

Contents:

The lovers -- Husband and wife -- The sisters -- Mother and child.

Physical Description:

272 pages ; 19 cm

Genre:

Magic realist fiction.

Time-travel fiction.

Subject Term:

Coffeehouses -- Fiction.

Interpersonal relations -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Tokyo (Japan) -- Fiction.

Author(s):

Trousselot, Geoffrey,

Publisher:

Hanover Square Press,

Publication Date:

2020

2019

ISBN:

9781335430991

Publication Information:

[Toronto, Ontario, Canada] : Hanover Square Press, 2020.

Call Number:

KAWAGUCHI

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003602920	Adult Fiction	KAWAGUCHI Toshikazu	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable
33607003639773	Adult Fiction	KAWAGUCHI Toshikazu	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?

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?

Meet more wonderful characters in the next captivating novel in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Before We Say Goodbye!

Read the rest of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series:

Tales from the Cafe Before Your Memory Fades

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Japanese playwright Kawaguchi's evocative English-language debut is set in a tiny Tokyo café where time travel is possible. In four connected tales, lovers and family members take turns sitting in the chair that allows a person to travel back in time for only as long as it takes a single cup of coffee to cool. In "Husband and Wife," a nurse goes back in time to visit her husband before his Alzheimer's erased her from his memory; in "The Sisters," a woman visits her younger sister, who died in an accident while trying to visit her, to apologize for not seeing her. Kawaguchi's characters embark on lo-fi, emotional journeys unburdened by the technicalities often found in time travel fiction--notably, they are unable to change the present. The characters learn, though, that even though people don't return to a changed present, they return "with a changed heart." Kawaguchi's tender look at the beauty of passing things, adapted from one of his plays, makes for an affecting, deeply immersive journey into the desire to hold onto the past. This wondrous tale will move readers. (Nov.)