by Admin | 22 Jul 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Current, FRONT PAGE NEWS
In August the group is reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold, the million copy selling Japanese cult read.
Deftly written and nimbly translated, Kawaguchi’s life-affirming tale of café-based time travel and symbolic hot beverages has all the hallmarks of a beloved cult classic.
What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small 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.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we 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 early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to 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 . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story – translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot – explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Meet at 1030 in the library to discuss!
by Library Admin | 7 Apr 2024 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Current, FRONT PAGE NEWS
In May, Cricklereaders are reading A Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss.
Award-winning American novelist Nicole Krauss first captivated readers with her groundbreaking debut novel Man Walks into a Room, a novel in which Krauss explores what it is to lose one’s identity and what it is to discover what makes us human.
Samson Greene has been missing for eight days when he is discovered wandering through the Nevada desert, ‘ragged as a crow’ and with no idea who he is. He is rushed to hospital where doctors save his life, but all his memories after the age of twelve have been permanently lost. Now, as he looks around the beautiful apartment he apparently shares with his wife and which is filed with all the souvenirs of a life well lived, Samson feels nothing more than a vague admiration.
In her first novel Nicole Krauss tells the story of a man suddenly liberated from the life he has made, disconnected from the people who have defined him. Withdrawing from a wife he has no memory of loving, Samson plunges weightless into the future. But when he agrees to participate in a revolutionary experiment, what he experiences a revelation of what it means to be human.
‘Krauss celebrates the anything-but-simple art of human connection’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘You’ll savour the last page – and be hungry for future work from this talented author’ The Washington Post Book World
Nicole Krauss is an American bestselling author who has received international critical acclaim for her first three novels: Great House (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011), The History of Love (Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 and winner of the 2006 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger) and Man Walks into a Room all of which are available in Penguin paperback.
The group will meet on Sunday 19 May at 1030 in the library.
