Before the Coffee Gets Cold: A Novel

The 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.