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Tales from the Cafe

By: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Narrated by: Kevin Shen
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Publisher's summary

From the author of the international best seller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this book follows four new customers who hope to travel back in time in a little Japanese café.

In a back alley in 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.

With faces both familiar and new, Tales from the Cafe follows the story of four patrons who visit to take advantage of café Funiculi Funicula's time-traveling offer and revisit moments with family, friends and lovers. Each one must face up to the past to move on with their life.

Kawaguchi's wistful and heartwarming new novel once again invites the listener to ask themselves, "What would you do if you could travel back in time?"

©2021 Toshikazu Kawaguchi (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about Tales from the Cafe

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A Perfect Follow-up

This second book is a special reminder to what a difference a few words can do to change a person’s life and bring happiness. More heartwarming stories to enjoy coffee by. You will want to listen without distractions or you can miss small details with the characters and stories. This second book is equally as good as the first and the series has become a favorite of mine I can listen to multiple times. Kevin Shen does a great job as did the first narrator. Looking forward to more stories.

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Simply genious

Everything about this book is wonderful. Yet the most profound thing is the absence of fairytale but a mere life where ppl like you and me are given a chance to... each of his and her own.
Read and make your choice.

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My first novel to read, and I’m hooked

I love the stories ,the feeling , the go back in time concept and the way how it made me think deeply about my life and my relationships . I hope someone in Japan could convert this amazing move to an anime movie, it would be amazing !

Thanks

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More wise lessons

Make sure to read the series in order. This is definitely a continuation story. Hard for me to remember the characters due to lapsed time between listening to the books and the unfamiliar names. The coffee pourers are rich characters.

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Wonderful book

This is a book I would recommend to a person grieving the loss of a friend, parent or partner. The store takes place in a coffee shop. The people in this story can go back in time or to the future to meet people for a short period of time. There are particular rules they must follow when traveling back in time. Beautifully written and will be buying a paperback copy to keep in home.

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sweet love stories

I listened to the 1st book in the series and loved it the female narrator was a little better than the male narrator for this one. But these stories were even better!

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Fun quirky short stories

I like anything set in Japan and usually stick to biographies and non-fiction. This was a pleasant twist to my usual reading pattern. The stories were short and enjoyable but most of all surprising. Some lessons similar to Aesops Fables but I never knew what to expect until I got to the end. A fun and imaginative escape into the lives of some interesting characters.

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More wonderful heartwarming stories

The second in the series, this book is similar to the first one. We meet more people and follow them to the past. We learn more about the woman in the white dress. We learn more about the staff at the café. If you liked the first book then you will like this one for sure. It took some time to get used to the narrator. Arina Ii did a wonderful job with the first one, portraying the heartwarming but sad mood of the story. Kevin Shen takes a somewhat livelier approach to the story but does it very well. I highly recommend if you liked the first one.

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A Charming Return to the Cafe

It has been a few years since the events of the first book, which you could argue may not matter for a cafe that allows for time travel. But this means a few changes in terms of our cast of characters at the cafe and a few other circumstances.

The book nicely builds on the lore established in the first book and not only shares new stories of people deciding to use the cafe to travel through time but also reveals more of the back story. And I appreciated this effort to build upon the lore and give us more on how things came to be. Combined with more poignant stories of people finding a use for the cafe's very particular brand of time travel, and it this all makes for a charming book.

It was a little jarring that the narrator for this audiobook is male versus the female voice for the first book, but eventually, I got it. More of the time travelers in this story were male versus the first book. But given we're following largely the same (or most of the same) characters. But yes, the shift made sense even if a little confusing at first.

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A collection of supernatural (ghost) stories

The novel includes four shorter stories about people who go to a cafe to travel through time to meet the people that they have unfinished business with. The theme seems to be that the people who truly love you would always look after you and want you to be happy even when they are gone from your world.

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