272 pages
English language
Published Jan. 7, 2021
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.
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?
A beautiful read. A bunch of mini stories, thatI transported me to a cafe in Japan. Sometimes it goes too much into detail, which normally is a bit slow for me, but in this case it help with character build up and somehow the author kept me entertained
Eg var usikker i starten. Forstod ikkje heilt "greia." Men jo lengre eg las, jo klarare ble det.
Boka er strukturert i fire mindre historiar, som får boka til å kjennast kort og fin, samtidig som alle historiane er kobla i lag.
Emosjonell. Fin. Morosam.
The premise, there's a seat in a coffee shop that allows you to travel to any other moment in time. The constraints - you can't leave the seat, and you only have as long as a cup of coffee stays warm.
The rules of the café are a bit silly, and repeated a few too many times, but the characters and the themes of the book are warm as a good cup of coffee, charming as a small out of the way café, and mostly very sweet in a way that coffee isn't. A time travel story that makes the simple point that what we really want when we fantasize about doing it is not a change to change the world, but to speak with someone.
Worth the short read.
I'm impatient these days. I read to relax and enjoy and escape the world's daily toils. And I'm not getting any younger. So I abandoned it after a couple of attempts. But maybe you love it, who knows!
A little gem of a book, given to me by a bright and doomed girl in loving affection - so how could it not resonate?
An easy to read and heartwarming story. It spoke to my sad soul and made me cry, so it must have been good.
I like the time travel rules! But everything else? Hoo man. It’s! Not great. I wasn’t surprised to find that the author originally was a playwright.
Very delicate book, and as I was commenting with a friend it probably loses something in the translation. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece and being a bestseller I was expecting something more from it, but it is a nice read. It explores joys and sorrows of human life through the lens of a café in Tokyo, interestingly named after a Neapolitan traditional song (!) which has the magic ability to let people travel in time.
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
More of a 3.5, but pretty good.
Sweet, a simply staged play or radio drama, a very constrained time travel premise, seems it could have been edited to be a tighter novella, but the loose threads aren't too frayed.
This wasn't for me. Lots of repetition, and each short story seemed designed to tug at your heart strings, but was too predictable to do so. Extremely boring messaging, with lots of female characters sacrificing themselves. I wanted them to explore the rules and the woman in the dress, but they never did. Very on the surface. Not a single cat (as pictured on the cover).
Short while read. Fresh approach to time travelling and the stories were enjoyable in and of itself, but I don't think the English translation does the author justice.
A cafe that serves strong enough coffee to transport one through time.
A quirky premise failed by such stilted writing. Kill your darlings the adage goes, but by that metric this is post-genocidal, hack-like storycraft.
Due to the international attention this book has attracted, I found myself wondering if it was a translation issue. Lo and behold - it was adapted into a novel from a theatrescript, where a significant amount of necessary emotion and artistry is delegated to the acting cast.
My fundamental problem with this book is that in converting "BTCGC" into a novel (for more $$$), not enough of that emotion and artistry has been added into the text. Characters' emotions race from zero to 100 in the space of a paragraph. Descriptions of setting and character appear to have been adapted directly from the writer's notes.
And yet, underneath it all is a charming and easy-to-read …
A cafe that serves strong enough coffee to transport one through time.
A quirky premise failed by such stilted writing. Kill your darlings the adage goes, but by that metric this is post-genocidal, hack-like storycraft.
Due to the international attention this book has attracted, I found myself wondering if it was a translation issue. Lo and behold - it was adapted into a novel from a theatrescript, where a significant amount of necessary emotion and artistry is delegated to the acting cast.
My fundamental problem with this book is that in converting "BTCGC" into a novel (for more $$$), not enough of that emotion and artistry has been added into the text. Characters' emotions race from zero to 100 in the space of a paragraph. Descriptions of setting and character appear to have been adapted directly from the writer's notes.
And yet, underneath it all is a charming and easy-to-read series of short stories. I would not hesistate to see it performed, although I have no appetite to read this book again in it's current form.
Time travel short stories based in a run down cafe in Tokyo. The stories cross path with each other naturally and the narrative flows in an interesting way. Although there are very few characters, it is complicated to grasp what’s the relationship is between them until the very last story of the book, so the reader kind of feels like time traveling too.
I think there’s an interesting concept in all the rules around the time travel process that make you reflect in whether you would do it or not. I don’t think I would.
