I feel like this book was everywhere about 5 years ago, and now I’ve finally got around to reading it after needing something to top up a Waterstones order to get free delivery!
From the blurb:
“In a small 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.
In Before the coffee gets cold, we 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 begun to fade, 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 sear, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…”
One of my favourite things about this book I discovered before I even started – in the front of the book is a relationship map of characters! This was so useful, showing who everyone was, and how they linked together. Particularly useful in this case as the names being Japanese were less familiar to me, and a lot began with K, so it was easy to confuse them while settling into the story. More books need this!
So the rules of the cafe are thus:
1. The only people one may meet while back in the past are those who have visited the cafe
2. No matter how hard one tries while back in the past, one cannot change the present
3. In order to return to the past, you have to sit in that seat and that seat alone
4. While back in the past, you must stay in the seat and never move from it
5. There is a time limit, you must return before the coffee gets cold
6. A person who has sat on the chair to travel through time once cannot do it a second time. Each person receives only a single chance
The book is divided into four chapters, one for each scenario, but the characters are all interwoven throughout so where I wondered if it might read as a set of short stories, it didn’t, there was flow throughout with all the characters knowing each other and being in the cafe for various reasons, and each had a flashback or two to share some backstory.
I’m not sure I’d read the rest of the series, I guess it depends how they work, whether it’s another set of characters and their stories, further travels with these characters, or something else entirely. But it was a really nice idea and I enjoyed it.
ineke.co.uk 