Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781538742570. Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor. I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband. I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out… and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late. But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am. They don’t know what I’m capable of…

What would you change if you could go back in time? In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café 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 café’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 café, 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?

Το βιβλίο αυτό έχει για ηρωίδα μια Ιφιγένεια. Μα είναι γραμμένο για όλες τις Ιφιγένειες του κόσμου που, κυνηγώντας την περιβόητη επιτυχία στο πανεπιστήμιο, διάβασαν ένα καράβι βιβλία, γέμισαν το κεφάλι τους μ' ανώμαλα ρήματα και τύπους της φυσικής, αλλά δεν πρόλαβαν να μάθουν πως ο άνθρωπος στηρίζει τη ζωή του πάνω σε πόδια από πηλό, αν στα χρυσά χρόνια της εφηβείας δεν μάθει, πριν απ' όλα, τον ίδιο του τον εαυτό. Κι αν ο δρόμος, που διάλεξε η ηρωίδα για να γνωρίσει επιτέλους τον δικό της εαυτό, φανεί λιγάκι ασυνήθιστος, σίγουρα για τον καθένα υπάρχει ένας δρόμος που του ταιριάζει, φτάνει να καταλάβει κάποια στιγμή, όπως εκείνη, πως η πραγματική επιτυχία στη ζωή ξεκινάει μονάχα απ' το τέρμα του.