Before the Coffee Gets Cold
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café 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.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’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 early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to 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 café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
This was quite a quirky book and the second Japanese book I have read. Not sure why there is a cat on the front as there isn't a cat in the book.
It was a little difficult to get into, a bit of scene setting at the beginning but as the book progressed it was much easier. There were some oddities with the translation, but nothing that particularly detracted from the story.
It is not Sci Fi, just as well as that is not my genre at all. A bi of fantasy maybe, a what if we could go back in time to speak to someone for that last time, or go forward and make a decision that we don't know how to make.
I thought it very cleverly done.
Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.