What would you do if you could travel back in time? Discover the internationally bestselling novels of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, now a worldwide phenomenon and BookTok sensation, in this special new book set. Step inside Tokyo’s whimsical Café Funiculi Funicula and travel back in time with a cast of unforgettable characters.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose. In Komachi’s unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams.

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.

Finlay Donovan is killing it...except, she’s really not. The new book she promised her literary agent isn’t written, her ex-husband fired the nanny without telling her, and this morning she had to send her four-year-old to school with hair duct-taped to her head.

Half-witch Kiki never runs from a challenge. So when her 13th birthday arrives, she's eager to follow a witch's tradition: choose a new town to call home for one year. Brimming with confidence, Kiki flies to the seaside village of Koriko and expects that her powers will easily bring happiness to the townspeople.

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

You may "know" Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright, as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of Obvious Child. But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish.

Laid off from her department store job, Carmen has perilously little cash and few options. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia, in Sofia’s perfect house with her perfect children and her perfectly ordered yuppie life, does not appeal. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there, either. But Sofia has yet another baby on the way, a mother desperate to see her daughters get along, and a client who needs help revitalizing his shabby old bookshop. So Carmen moves in and takes the job.

It is 1992, and Bihac, Amra's hometown, is a multicultural city with Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. But when tensions escalate, the Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors. The Serbs control the army, and now they have peaceful Bihac surrounded. Soon Amra and her family are dealing with starvation and the threat of brutal violence; school, friendships, and the attentions from a new boy have to take a back seat to finding food and the tragic fallout from rising bigotry and ethnic hatred. Through it all, a stray cat, Maci, serves as a guardian spirit to the entire family.

Blind since birth, widowed in her 20s, now lonely in her 40s, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne's passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter's night. Whilst Marianne has had her share of men attracted to her because they want to rescue her, Keir makes no concession to her condition.

Seven cats weave their way through their owners’ lives, climbing, comforting, nestling, and sometimes just tripping everyone up in this uplifting collection of tales by international bestselling author Hiro Arikawa. Bursting with love and warmth, The Goodbye Cat exquisitely explores the cycle of life, from birth to death—as each of the seven stories explores how, in different ways, the steadiness and devotion of a well-loved cat never lets us down.

With simple yet descriptive prose, this novel gives voice to Nana the cat and his owner, Satoru, as they take to the road on a journey with no other purpose than to visit three of Satoru's longtime friends. Or so Nana is led to believe. With his crooked tail - a sign of good fortune - and adventurous spirit, Nana is the perfect companion for the man who took him in as a stray. And as they travel in a silver van across Japan, with its ever-changing scenery and seasons, they will learn the true meaning of courage and gratitude, of loyalty and love.

Mitsuha, a high school girl living in a small town in the mountains, has a dream that she's a boy living in Tokyo. Taki, a high school boy in Tokyo, dreams he's a girl living in a quaint little mountain town. Sharing bodies, relationships, and lives, the two become inextricably interwoven—but are any connections truly inseverable in the grand tapestry of fate?

A couple in their 30s live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife - the days have more light and color.

Longing to escape his island home, a boy named Hodaka runs away during his first summer of high school to find a new life in Tokyo. As rain falls for days on end and Hodaka struggles to adjust, he meets a girl named Hina who holds a mysterious power: With a single prayer, she can part the clouds and bring back the sun. But her power comes at a price, and as the weather spirals further and further out of control, they must choose what future they truly want for themselves.

A peculiar pet shop in Tokyo has been known to offer customers a unique opportunity: the chance to adopt one of seven special cats whose "magic" is never promised, but always received. But there are rules: these cats must be returned after three days. They must eat only the food supplied by the owner, and they must travel to their new homes with a distinctive blanket. In The Blanket Cats, we meet seven customers, each of whom is hoping a temporary feline companion will help them escape a certain reality.

Burned out by her TV news writing job, Jungmin leaves in an attempt to salvage her life. When she stumbles upon a mysterious pottery studio, she feels immediately at home. The warmth, the smell of clay, and the incredible coffee awaken her senses and make her feel alive for the first time in months. Over the coming year, season by season, pot by pot, Jungmin returns to herself and builds unexpected friendships with the other members of the studio, who are all working through their own trials at the pottery wheel.

Many antidepressants - the first line in our standard of care for treating depression - bring with them potential health risks, yet one in six Americans takes medication to alleviate feeling sad, anxious, stuck, or unable to focus or sleep. More and more, conventional medicine pathologizes how we respond to life's challenges - like feeling trapped in an unfulfilling job, grieving the death of a loved one, or being anxious about a bad relationship - telling us that they're symptoms of disease.

Sentaro has failed. He has a criminal record, drinks too much, and his dream of becoming a writer is just a distant memory. With only the blossoming of the cherry trees to mark the passing of time, he spends his days in a tiny confectionery shop selling dorayaki, a type of pancake filled with sweet bean paste. Into his life comes Tokue, an elderly woman with disfigured hands and a troubled past. Tokue makes the best sweet bean paste Sentaro has ever tasted. She begins to teach him her craft, but as their friendship flourishes, social pressures become impossible to escape.

The postman’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat, Cabbage, to keep him company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can tackle his bucket list, the Devil appears to make him an offer: In exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, our narrator will get one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week....

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Discover the internationally bestselling novels of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, now a worldwide phenomenon and BookTok sensation, in this special new book set. Step inside Tokyo’s whimsical Café Funiculi Funicula and travel back in time with a cast of unforgettable characters.

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose. In Komachi’s unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams.

As revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson’s Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, 'old' has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease.

The world moves fast, but that doesn't mean we have to. In this best-selling mindfulness guide - it has sold more than three million copies in Korea, where it was a number-one best-seller for 41 weeks and received multiple best book of the year awards - Haemin Sunim (which means "spontaneous wisdom"), a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher born in Korea and educated in the United States, illuminates a path to inner peace and balance amid the overwhelming demands of everyday life.

The author of the blockbuster New York Times best sellers The Happiness Project and Happier at Home tackles the critical question: How do we change? Gretchen Rubin's answer: through habits. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness the energy of habits to build happier, stronger, more productive lives.