– Read: 5th June to 12th June –

Often, you can read a book and want to be transported into that world. To be fighting the orcs of Middle Earth, or meeting vampires in Washington, books have the ability to transport us to other worlds and let us live in a story for a while.

To me, ‘Before the Coffee gets Cold’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a story about that feeling, with the characters each having their own reason to want to live in a story they know. The main rule of the time travelling café is simple: ‘Whatever you change in the past, will not change in the present’ and yet the book violates that rule. Each of the characters present does change from the time they go back to when they come back. Nothing about the world itself changes, they do!

Ultimately, the book teaches us to not hide from life, to say what needs to be said, and to life every day as if one day in the future, you’ll want to be sat right where you are right now. Provided there isn’t a woman in a dress sitting there instead, of course.