Published by: Picador
Pages: 192
Date released: 17/09/2020
Date read: 07/12/2020
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.
From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Café Funiculi Funicula’s time-travelling offer.
Among some faces that will be familiar of Kawaguchi’s previous novel, we will be introduced to:
The man who goes back to see his best friend who died 22 years ago.
The son who was unable to attend his own mother’s funeral.
The man who travelled to see the girl who he could not marry.
The old detective who never gave his wife that gift.
This beautiful, simple tale tells the story of people who must face up to their past, in order to move on with their lives. Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?
This is the second book in Kawaguchi’s Tales from the Café series and I admit I was deeply disappointed.
I really enjoyed the first one and recommended it to many people, so I was looking forward to another instalment. Yet I found it really hard to find the enthusiasm to finish it. This book brought nothing that the first one didn’t: it was effectively the same book as the first one. And yet the customers weren’t as exciting, I didn’t really care why they were going back to the past. It just wasn’t as compelling as the first one.
I hate writing a bad review as I know how hard authors work for their books, but this just wasn’t my thing. I probably wouldn’t recommend this sequel.
Books By Your Bedside 