Books like “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”

What to read after “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

About “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”

Another favorite book?

Or start with a well-known book

1
The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
After her mother's death, Leigh travels to Taiwan to meet grandparents she has never known, convinced her mother has returned as a red bird. Grief, a family silence and a friendship she left behind come together as she learns what she can and cannot hold on to.
2
The Cat Who Saved Books
Sosuke Natsukawa · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism”
- Magical Realism
A grieving schoolboy meets a talking tabby who leads him through a labyrinth of libraries to rescue books from careless owners. Each strange trial nudges him back toward the world and the people he has shut out.
3
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Leslye Walton · 2014
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Born with wings she cannot fly, Ava grows up in a Seattle house where the women carry a long history of love that ends badly. As she longs to be an ordinary girl, her family's sorrows keep shaping everyone around her.
4
A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness · 2011
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Thirteen-year-old Conor is visited at night by a monster shaped like a yew tree, who promises to tell him three stories in exchange for a fourth, one Conor must tell himself. Meanwhile his mother is ill, and Conor struggles with grief, anger and guilt.
5
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Stuck between life and death, Nora Seed finds a library whose shelves hold all the lives she might have lived if she had chosen differently. She tries them one by one, measuring her regrets against what she actually wants from being alive.
6
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger · 2003
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
Henry has a genetic condition that pulls him through time without warning, so his life with the artist Clare never runs in the usual order. They meet again and again at different ages, and their love must hold through long absences and a future neither of them can change.
7
The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Hisashi Kashiwai · 2013
Similar atmosphere: “Comfort Read” and “Melancholic”
- Comfort Read
- Melancholic
At a small Kyoto diner, Nagare Kamogawa and his daughter quietly work as food detectives. Clients describe a dish they cannot forget, and the pair trace its ingredients and the people tied to it, recovering memories, old losses and small reconciliations along the way.
8
Legends & Lattes
Travis Baldree · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Comfort Read”
- Comfort Read
Viv, a battle-weary orc, trades her sword for an espresso machine and opens the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. With a hobgoblin carpenter, a reformed succubus and a skeletal latte artist, she builds a warm new life -- but her old mercenary crew has not finished with her yet.
9
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V. E. Schwab · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
In 1714 France, Addie LaRue makes a desperate deal to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. For three hundred years she drifts through history unseen, until in a New York bookshop a young man tells her that he remembers her.
10
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Comfort Read” and “Melancholic”
- Comfort Read
- Melancholic
Tova Sullivan cleans the local aquarium at night and talks to Marcellus, a clever giant Pacific octopus. When Marcellus works out the answer to a loss that has haunted her for years, a drifting young man arrives in town, and three quiet lives slowly knit together.
11
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse · 1927
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
A middle-aged loner who feels half man and half wolf drifts through a city he despises, until a chance encounter leads him to a strange magic theatre. There he confronts the many selves inside him. A novel about alienation, desire and finding one's way back to life.
12
The Goblin Emperor
Katherine Addison · 2014
Similar atmosphere: “Comfort Read”
- Comfort Read
Maia, the exiled half-goblin youngest son, is unwanted and forgotten until an airship crash makes him emperor. He arrives at a hostile court with few allies and must learn whom to trust while trying to rule with kindness and stay alive.