Tales from the cafe A novel

Expanding the insightful delights introduced in global bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2020), readers are welcomed back to Funiculi Funicula, Tokyo's time-travel café. The rules haven't changed, especially the two most urgent: the temporal seeker must wait for the woman-in-white to vacate her seat (yes, even ghosts seek relief!), and, once the fresh coffee is poured, it must be drunk before it gets cold. Although time can be briefly defied, the present cannot be changed. Repeating the intertwined four-part format in this second volume, four guests are transported backward or forward to meet someone beloved: a bride's father seeks his best friend, a potter his late mother, a dying man his fiancée, a policeman his beloved wife. And in between visits, the woman-in-white gets her poignant backstory, while singular coffee-pourer Kazu gets her own provenance revealed. Lauded playwright Kawaguchi originally created this for the stage, then turned new novelist to adapt his award-winning play for the page. His prose--English-enabled again by Geoffrey Trousselot--might not be the most elegantly polished, but the book's resonating charm provides lasting emotional balm. Read now, watch later: the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series is getting the Hollywood treatment from the teams behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, among other hits.

This meaningful and emotional sequel to Before the Coffee Gets Cold features four interconnected stories with a broad range of characters. The fascinating premise unfolds in a Tokyo café that allows a return to the past, as long as the patrons don't leave their seats and as long as they finish what they need to do before their coffee gets cold. No matter what they do, the café patrons cannot change the present; some of them wonder, What's the point of going back in time? As the characters seek and discover the answer to that question, their stories gracefully confront hard topics such as bereavement, despair, parenthood, financial destitution, suicide, miscarriage, and illness. Kawaguchi has found a unique way to manipulate such a commonly used trope as time travel and has captured the power of joy as a legacy. VERDICT These tearful stories hit hard but ultimately lead to a beautiful ending. Fans of Matt Haig's Midnight Library will enjoy this quick read with touches of magical realism and soul-searching.--Andrea Dyba, Oswego P.L. Dist., IL