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Before the Coffee Gets Cold
59,000 TNDThe million-copy bestselling series about a cosy Japanese cafe that offers its visitors the chance to travel back in time. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s heart-warming Before the Coffee Gets Cold, translated from Japanese, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?In a cosy back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe 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.
Prepare to meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the cafe’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 Alzheimer’s- see their sister one last time, and- 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 cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . .
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Before We Forget Kindness
59,000 TNDIn the fifth book in the sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious Tokyo cafe where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests:
– The father who could not allow his daughter to get married
– A woman who couldn’t give Valentine’s Day chocolates to her loved one
– A boy who wants to show his smile to his divorced parents
– A wife holding a child with no name . . .They must follow the cafe’s strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold.
Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before We Forget Kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to move on their present, finding closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future.
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Before We Say Goodbye
59,000 TNDThe million-copy bestselling series. Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s poignant Before We Say Goodbye, translated from Japanese, explores the age-old question: what would you do if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?The regulars at the magical Cafe Funiculi Funicula are well acquainted with its famous legend and extraordinary, secret menu time travel offering. Many patrons have reunited with old flames, made amends with estranged family, and visited loved ones.
But the journey is not without risks and there are rules to follow. Travellers must have visited the cafe previously and most importantly, must return to the present in the time it takes for their coffee to go cold. In the tradition of Kawaguchi’s sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, readers are be introduced to a new set of visitors:- The husband with something important left to say- The woman who couldn’t bid her dog farewell- The woman who couldn’t answer a proposal- The daughter who drove her father away .
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Before Your Memory Fades
59,000 TNDCafe Donna Donna offers its customers the extraordinary experience of travelling through time. From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Cafe comes another heartfelt story of lost souls hoping to take advantage of the cafe’s time-travelling offer. Among some familiar faces, readers will also be introduced to:
The daughter who begrudges her deceased parents for leaving her orphaned
The comedian who aches for his beloved and their shared dreams
The younger sister whose grief has become all-consuming
The young man who realizes his love for his childhood friend too late . -
Blowfish
79,000 TNDThis was how her grandmother killed herself, in front of her husband and child. Delicate, artful but with a sense of guaranteed finality. The architect’s life has been marred by death.
His elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. He too is pondering his own exit from this life. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide.
For the man, the woman is a way to forestall his death and offer him an exit. Through the impressions they leave on each other, they reflect on their own lives. Taking readers through various urban spaces of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish delves into the inner lives of two people contemplating their failures in love and art.
What truly makes life worth living?
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Bookstore Girls
59,000 TNDCan two very different women put aside their differences to save the bookstore they love? The Japanese bestseller that kicked off a seven-book series – adapted for TV and 200,000 copies soldRiko Nishioka is assistant manager of the flagship Pegasus bookstore in Kichijoji. After working her way up from a part-time position, she is now, aged forty, a respected figure in the Japanese publishing industry. But she has a nemesis.
Aki Kitamura, twenty-seven, has waltzed in as a full-time employee thanks to her family connections. A free spirit with a rebellious streak and a silver spoon in her mouth, she’s anything but a team player. The two are always clashing – both at work and over their personal lives.
But when Riko is given notice that the store will be closing in six months’ time, they face a stark choice. Can they put their petty enmities aside to boost sales and save their livelihoods or will they go down fighting . . -
Breasts and Eggs
59,000 TNDOn a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She’s accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession.
Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another. Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future.
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Broken Wings
59,000 TNDDespite her humble rural beginnings, Butterfly regards herself as a sophisticated young woman. So, when offered a lucrative job in the city, she jumps at the chance. But instead of being given work, she is trafficked and sold to Bright Black, a desperate man from a poor mountain village.
Trapped in Bright’s cave home with her new “husband”, she plans her escape… not so easily done in this isolated and remote village where she is watched day and night. Will her tenacity and free spirit survive, or will she be broken?
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Butter
59,000 TNDThe cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer, and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story
There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can’t resist writing back.
Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a master class in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii, but it seems that Rika might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Do she and Kajii have more in common than she once thought?
Inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer—the “Konkatsu Killer”—Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance, and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
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Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree
59,000 TNDIn one-child China, when a mother runs from home because of her illegal pregnancy, it’s Kong Fanhua’s problem. She’s the only female village chief in Xiushui County, and her day-to-day tasks range from the mundane to the near-impossible: tracking down this runaway who left her twins behind, keeping rumours of a vengeful ghost at bay while trying to convince some rich American to invest in the local paper plant. Not to mention looking after her own farm and family.
After all, the crops aren’t going to plant themselves. While the incompetent men in local government fail to get much done, Fanhua picks up the slack. But when higher-ups start investigating her hometown’s birth quotas just as she’s up for re-election, the squeeze is on.
Can she keep all the plates spinning? Or will she resort to villainous tactics to preserve the peace? And why won’t her lazy husband shut up about camels?
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Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
69,000 TNDFrom the acclaimed author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: here is Yu Hua’s unflinching portrait of life under Chairman Mao. A cart-pusher in a silk mill, Xu Sanguan augments his meager salary with regular visits to the local blood chief. His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao’s regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man’s days.
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Confessions
59,000 TNDWhen Yuko Moriguchi’s four-year-old daughter died in the middle school where she teaches, everyone thought it was a tragic accident. It’s the last day of term, and Yuko’s last day at work. She tells her students that she has resigned because of what happened – but not for the reasons they think.
Her daughter didn’t die in an accident. Her daughter was killed by two people in the class. And before she leaves, she has a lesson to teach…
But revenge has a way of spinning out of control, and Yuko’s last lecture is only the start of the story. In this bestselling Japanese thriller of love, despair and murder, everyone has a confession to make, and no one will escape unharmed.