For a limited time, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s magical realism, fantasy novel set in Japan, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” is on sale from the Amazon Kindle store for only $2.99.
I read this book earlier this year and thought it was an intriguing and delightful read about a coffee shop with a table that could give you the chance to travel back in time. The time travel, however, has a strict number of rules that the traveler must follow, or else run the risk of being stuck back in the past time.
Here’s a description of the book from the publisher on Goodreads:
What would you change if you could go back in time?
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 . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
The book is written as novel with progressing stories of the time travelers, so it can also be viewed like a series of short stories with the unique coffee shop as the main link between them.
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