Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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What to expect

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. . . '
[email protected] 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.

Critics Review

‘ Heartwarming, whimsical . . . offering comfort at a time when the world seems off-kilter and chaotic’

The New York Times

User Reviews

Book 4.6
Narration 4.9
5.0
5.0
Sam-G 31/03/2023
5.0
5.0
jasminehope 09/06/2023
5.0
5.0
rachieing 15/05/2023
4.0
5.0
thalia 07/12/2023
5.0
5.0
Excellent narration. Interesting time travel stories. I actually read the book about a year ago but found it difficult to follow the characters (in the book). Naturally they all had Japanese names. I couldn't tell sometimes if it was a man or a woman. The narrator made it very clear who was talking to whom.
Rocketman 24/10/2023
4.0
4.0
sc.willmott 12/06/2023
5.0
5.0
Wow, just wow. Loved it.
johanna 10/10/2023
4.0
5.0
Epicuria 24/06/2024

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