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Before the Coffee Gets Cold
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?
This discussion guide was shared and sponsored in partnership with HANOVER SQUARE PRESS.
Book club questions for Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
If you had to follow the book’s rules, would you time travel? And where or when would you go?
If you didn’t have to follow the book’s rules, would that change your answer?
Café, characters, or coffee -- where do you think the magic came from? Or did the magic come from something else?
Which of the time travel rules was the most frustrating? And did you think of any loopholes to get around it?
Are you a fan of time travel in novels? Did you enjoy the way the novel handled it as magical realism rather than rooted through science? Did you wish to know more about it?
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an international bestseller, what do you think makes the story so appealing to people from all over the world?
Before the Coffee Gets Cold Book Club Questions PDF
Click here for a printable PDF of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold discussion questions
"Before the Coffee Gets Cold... may explore similar ground to its predecessors in the genre, but it inventively limits the mechanics of its time travel to the confines of a small cafe, and is all the more resonant for it... the narrative is deeply moving." —Chicago Review of Books
"A complete page-turner from the start to the end.”—Buzzfeed
"Toshikazu lays out a system of time travel that is unconvoluted and beautifully simple... This charmingly magical novel is about discovering happiness despite the pasts that we desperately want to revisit." —The Harvard Crimson