Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café 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 café’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.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Pregnancy
  • Miscarriage
  • Terminal illness, specifically Alzheimer’s disease
  • Death of a parent
  • Car accident
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The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified – by everyone except their parents.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Misogyny
  • Mental illness
  • Drug use
  • Miscarriage
  • Chronic illness
  • Murder
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The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Meet Mma Ramotswe, the endearing, engaging, simply irresistible proprietress of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the first and only detective agency in Botswana. With persistent observation, gentle intuition, and a keen desire to help people with the problems of their lives, she solves mysteries great and small for friends and strangers alike.

In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, and good humor—not to mention help from her loyal assistant, Grace Makutsi, and the occasional cup of tea.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Domestic violence
  • Miscarriage
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Fifty Shades Freed by EL James

Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James

When unworldly student Anastasia Steele first encountered the driven and dazzling young entrepreneur Christian Grey it sparked a sensual affair that changed both of their lives irrevocably. Shocked, intrigued, and, ultimately, repelled by Christian’s singular erotic tastes, Ana demands a deeper commitment. Determined to keep her, Christian agrees.

Now, Ana and Christian have it all—love, passion, intimacy, wealth, and a world of possibilities for their future. But Ana knows that loving her Fifty Shades will not be easy, and that being together will pose challenges that neither of them would anticipate. Ana must somehow learn to share Christian’s opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own identity. And Christian must overcome his compulsion to control as he wrestles with the demons of a tormented past.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted sexual assault recounted
  • Statutory rape recounted
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Domestic violence mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Unplanned pregnancy
  • Hospitalisation
  • Parent in a medically-induced coma because of a car accident
  • Death of a mother from an overdose recounted
  • Attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping & attempted kidnapping
  • Blackmail
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Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Then: She was fifteen, her mother’s golden girl. She had her whole life ahead of her. And then, in the blink of an eye, Ellie was gone.

Now: It’s been ten years since Ellie disappeared, but Laurel has never given up hope of finding her daughter. And then one day a charming and charismatic stranger called Floyd walks into a café and sweeps Laurel off her feet. Before too long she’s staying the night at this house and being introduced to his nine year old daughter.

Poppy is precocious and pretty – and meeting her completely takes Laurel’s breath away. Because Poppy is the spitting image of Ellie when she was that age. And now all those unanswered questions that have haunted Laurel come flooding back. What happened to Ellie? Where did she go? Who still has secrets to hide?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Suicide by gun violence, off-page
  • Nonconsensual insemination of a child
  • Kidnapping
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark who learns of the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders Hamlet’s father, his own brother, to take the throne of Denmark and to marry Hamlet’s widowed mother. Hamlet is sunk into a state of great despair as a result of discovering the murder of his father and the infidelity of his mother. Hamlet is torn between his great sadness and his desire for the revenge of his father’s murder.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Suicide
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Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older black couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.

Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another? 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Body horror
  • Emesis
  • Blood depiction
  • Excrement
  • Death
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Switch by A. S. King

Switch by A. S. King

Switch by A. S. King

Tru Beck is a teenage girl from Pennsylvania who lives in a world that has become trapped in a fold in time and space, where “real” time has stopped but humanity continues to mark artificial time based on a website called N3WCLOCK.com. Tru lives in a house that has a switch at its center. No one knows what the switch controls, but her father continually builds larger and larger boxes around the switch (Tru lives in Box #7). Tru leaves the box through a Tru-shaped hole to go to school, where she pays no attention to the new “Solution Time” curriculum. In fact, the only interesting thing that’s ever happened to Tru at school is when she discovers (on her first try) that she can throw a javelin farther than any human has ever thrown anything before in human history.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Toxic relationship
  • Domestic abuse
  • Emotional abuse
  • Physical abuse
  • Paedophilia implied
  • Statutory mentioned
  • Mental illness
  • Suicidal thoughts
  • Animal cruelty
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Go With the Flow by Lily Williams & Karen Schneemann

Go With the Flow by Lily Williams & Karen Schneemann

Go With the Flow by Lily Williams & Karen Schneemann

Sophomores Abby, Brit, Christine, and Sasha are fed up. Hazelton High never has enough tampons. Or pads. Or adults who will listen.

Sick of an administration that puts football before female health, the girls confront a world that shrugs―or worse, squirms―at the thought of a menstruation revolution. They band together to make a change. It’s no easy task, especially while grappling with everything from crushes to trig to JV track but they have each other’s backs. That is, until one of the girls goes rogue, testing the limits of their friendship and pushing the friends to question the power of their own voices.

Now they must learn to work together to raise each other up. But how to you stand your ground while raising bloody hell?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Body shaming
  • Misogyny
  • Sexism
  • Bullying
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Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Now she returns with Sisters, a haunting story about two sisters caught in a powerful emotional web and wrestling to understand where one ends and the other begins.

Born just ten months apart, July and September are thick as thieves, never needing anyone but each other. Now, following a case of school bullying, the teens have moved away with their single mother to a long-abandoned family home near the shore. In their new, isolated life, July finds that the deep bond she has always shared with September is shifting in ways she cannot entirely understand. A creeping sense of dread and unease descends inside the house. Meanwhile, outside, the sisters push boundaries of behavior—until a series of shocking encounters tests the limits of their shared experience, and forces shocking revelations about the girls’ past and future.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault
  • Toxic relationships
  • Mental illness
  • Self-harm
  • Blood
  • Child death
  • Grief
  • Bullying
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