Before the Coffee Gets Cold Audiobook By Toshikazu Kawaguchi cover art

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

A Novel

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Before the Coffee Gets Cold

By: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Narrated by: Arina Ii
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The first book in the five million-copy bestselling magical realism series

If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

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.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Meet more wonderful characters in the rest of the captivating Before the Coffee Gets Cold series:
  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Book 1)
  • Tales from the Cafe (Book 2)
  • Before Your Memory Fades (Book 3)
  • Before We Say Goodbye (Book 4)
  • Before We Forget Kindness (Book 5)
  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Boxed Set (Books 1-3)
 Time Travel Magical Realism Literary Fiction Genre Fiction Fantasy Contemporary Paranormal & Urban Science Fiction
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A fun concept hamstrung by very poor writing and possibly a poor translation. It's very clear when author is writing about things they don't understand and didn't bother to fact check, this makes the characters and setting feel very hollow.

Fun concept hamstrung by poor writing.

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I found this to be such a joyful book to listen to. It was a beautifully written stories with decisions that were thoughtfully planned out. This book had every opportunity to be a tedious and annoying book, but it absolutely was not. It was well written and really put yourself in the character’s situation and wonder, what would I do? This book was such a pleasure to listen to.

Simple and so entertaining

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This was a unique read. Time travel is a well used theme in stories and often times the stories take on a similar template and you kind of know the direction it will take. But this, this was different. This little coffee shop in Japan offered this serious opportunity to travel back in time for as long as the coffee stays warm.

The rules to the time travel opportunities were really different too. It drives home the question of "what would you do if you could go back to a time in your past" Why would you go and what would you hope to accomplish.

The characters were quirky as was the setting. You don't get much development outside of the coffee shop but the characters who frequent it bring the life to it.

Being American and not familiar with too many Japanese names I found it a bit hard to follow the names of the characters at times as some of them sounded similar and without seeing the name on paper to differentiate it from the next you really had to pay attention to the goings on of the characters to follow who was who.

It's a fresh and different take on a overused theme. I liked it.

really interesting unique take on time travel

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this book made me laugh and weep. it's beautiful and will stay with me for a long time

crushing and beautiful

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I wasn't expecting to read what I read. I think I was expecting something more whimsical and science-laced. There was none if that here. However, this wasn't at all a bad read and I pushed through to the finish, despite its slow build-up.

Very thought provoking

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