Available Formats
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
By (Author) Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Pan Macmillan
Picador
24th September 2019
19th September 2019
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Speculative fiction
Science fiction: time travel
Fiction in translation
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
Narrative theme: Sense of place
Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Narrative theme: Interior life
895.636
Paperback
224
Width 131mm, Height 196mm, Spine 15mm
166g
One of the most popular Booktok books on Tiktok in 2022 In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a caf 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 caf'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 caf, 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
Toshikazu Kawaguchi was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971. He formerly produced, directed and wrote for the theatrical group Sonic Snail. As a playwright, his works include COUPLE, Sunset Song, and Family Time. The novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold is adapted from a 1110 Productions play by Kawaguchi, which won the 10th Suginami Drama Festival grand prize.