Before the Coffee Gets Cold | Toshikazu Kawaguchi | Picador

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

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a beautiful, moving, and internationally beloved novel by Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi — a story about time, regret, love, and the things we wish we could say.

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that 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 lover 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 its rules: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and — most importantly — 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 do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet — maybe for one last time?

Why Readers Around the World Love This Book

• A deeply emotional, quietly magical story that stays with you long after the last page
• Four interconnected stories of love, loss, regret, and reconciliation
• Set in an atmospheric, intimate Tokyo café — a world unto itself
• A meditation on what truly matters: the words we leave unsaid and the people we miss
• An international phenomenon — a #1 bestseller translated into over 40 languages
• Perfect for fans of The Midnight Library, The House in the Cerulean Sea, and Anxious People

About the Author

Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a Japanese author and playwright. Before the Coffee Gets Cold began as a stage play before becoming a bestselling novel series. The book has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into over 40 languages. The series continues with Tales from the Café, Before Your Memory Fades, and Before We Forget Kindness.

Book Details

• Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• Translated by: Geoffrey Trousselot
• Publisher: Picador
• Category: Fiction / Magical Realism / Japanese Literature
• ISBN: 978-1-035-03505-2
• Available for sale in the Indian subcontinent