The Before the Coffee Gets Cold series is delightful, giving customers to café Funiculi Funicula the opportunity to revisit the past to meet a loved one. There are many rules, but the main one is that you must drink your coffee before it gets cold otherwise you’ll end up as a ghost at the café. In the fourth instalment of the series (a fifth looks to have been published in Japan earlier this year), the formula hasn’t changed but the stories are still tender and heartbreaking.

The timing of this novel seems to be a little out of line with the others (although I suppose you can’t really criticise a time travelling café series for not having linear time!). In this novel, Kazu’s daughter is not mentioned, nor is the previous trip north to help with another café. I also got the feeling that both Nagare and Kazu were a bit younger. But overall, it doesn’t matter too much. I was a little disappointed that very little was mentioned about Kazu and Nagare’s characters and that they were just there to run the café.