Travel • Culture • Stories
With
suspense novels, it is a stretch to expect the level of prose and narrative
pull found in Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, or, more precisely, in
psychological suspense like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and a select few
other masterful writers in the genre.
Literature and cinema have long framed infidelity as the realm of complex people, those seduced by ambition, power, or erotic excess, fleeing from spouses appearing dull by comparison or committing abuse. Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair resists that over used theme. Its protagonists are noticeable for their ordinariness. Like the ordinary characters played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in the classic film “Falling in Love”, a story of two random commuters who always meet on the train, the book’s leading characters Cora and Sam are neighbors who are as any other normal homeowners.
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Cora is a mother of two, stalled in a job beneath her capacities, married to Eliot, a man full of dreams and emotionally generous husband whose very chill demeanor invites room for deceit. Sam, married to the driven and career woman Jules, is similarly unremarkable. Their affair is not born of grand passion but of domestic fatigue: the dull ache of routines perfected inside the household and the schools of their children and personal desires and dreams put to the side.
The Ten Year Affair follows our millennial foursome characters (Sam and Eliot celebrated their 40th birthdays sometime after the pandemic) through their friendship, closeness to each other in a country town a couple of hours away from New York City, and years of unspoken longing.
The novel takes us on a journey as Cora and Sam, drawn together through shared domestic tasks of mostly working from home and being active parents in the children’s school lives, beginning a relationship that blossoms slowly in real life and fast-paced in the imaginary world. As time passes, parallel versions of their lives - one imagined, one real - begin to combine, forcing choices that test loyalty, responsibility, and the cost of desire acted upon.
Somers introduces a “sliding doors” structure early through the novel, contrasting fantasy and actuality. When the imagined life proves more complicated than the real one because of the affair, the book takes a turn as the real world becomes where the true infidelity happens. The affair’s emotional consequences, particularly for Cora, are rendered with restraint rather than melodrama. Sam’s moral stonewalling, meanwhile, is as infuriating as it gets. His instinct to preserve his marriage while abandoning Cora's own dilemma in being the other half of the affair, leaves the reader feeling that he ultimately earns the ending he receives.
Claims that the novel rivals Madame Bovary as one of the best book about having an affair is a stretch of the imagination. Still, Somers delivers something direct and perhaps equally unsettling: a study of marriage not as romance gone sour, but as endurance tested by exhaustion, parenthood, economic pressure and the temptation to believe that life might feel fuller with someone else, even within an otherwise non-toxic marriage.
If you’re not in a toxic relationship, I guess, then don’t play games, as the novel would want to convey.
★★½
I
have always gravitated toward Asian literature, drawn to its focus to interior
lives and its ability to connect the personal with the political. That pull
becomes even stronger when the setting is India, a place I’ve visited four
times in the past and where history, inequality, and survival often appears
more powerful on the page. Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief
arrives squarely within that scope, offering a speculative yet unsettlingly portrait
of a near-future Kolkata reshaped by climate catastrophe and moral compromise.
Reading Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold reminded me of those early days of discovering Haruki Murakami when Japanese fiction first revealed its different style for building atmosphere rather than relying on surprising plot-twists. Like Murakami, Kawaguchi crafts a world where the characters exists alongside the mundane, where emotional truth matters more than logic, and where the real journey is found on each character's realization.
Where Murakami leans toward surrealism, existential drift, and metaphysical loneliness, Kawaguchi threads the simpler ground. He creates a world that is smaller, almost domestic – in the case for this book. The café replaces the dreamscape; regret replaces alienation. Both writers, however, share a focus for mood, memory, and the unspoken weight of human relationships.
Set in a small Tokyo café rumored to offer a chance to travel through time, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores what happens when people are briefly allowed to revisit moments they wish they could change. Bound by a strict set of rules and the certainty of returning to the present, visitors must confront any regret and unfinished emotions. What unfolds is not a science fiction story about time travel itself, but about what it means to be human within it.
At the heart of the novel are its characters: ordinary people portrayed for readers to easily relate to, Fumiko, career-driven yet vulnerable woman longing for closure with his ex-boyfriend Goro. Kotake, a caring nurse who carries a lifetime of unspoken devotion to her Alzheimer stricken husband Fusagi. (Yaeko) Hirai, a café regular with a rebellious streak but has a soft spot for her younger sister (Kumi). The cafe owners Nagare and Kei whose own storyline tugs at the heartstrings, especially bout Kei's reason for traveling through time.
And Kazu, the café’s steady presence, offers calm authority without ever overshadowing the stories going on around her. Each character feels less like a narrative device and more like someone you might have once known or been.
What makes these characters easy to relate to is not about their transformation, but their acceptance. Kawaguchi doesn’t force dramatic reversals. Instead, he allows small emotional shifts to do the heavy lifting: a change in perspective, a softened resentment, a moment of understanding that arrives too late and, somehow, just in time.
This is also what distinguishes Kawaguchi’s take on time travel. Reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold changed my own long-held view of the genre. I once thought of time travel as a fantasy of revising the past, therefore risking the present, or a gamble on a better outcome. Kawaguchi reframes it more elegantly: time travel here is not about changing what happened, but about changing how we carry on forward. The past remains intact; the present undisturbed. What alters is the future shaped by clarity rather than regret.
The novel is the first in a trilogy, and its structure reflects that larger arc. Each story stands alone yet contributes to a broader reflection on memory, choice, and emotional inheritance. There’s a confidence in how Kawaguchi trusts readers to read with uncertainty, to find significance without explanation.
I’m glad I discovered this book last year, even more so that I found the time to read it now. As the one that kickstarted my one-book-per-week resolution for 2026, it feels almost ceremonial like a reminder that some stories arrive exactly when they’re meant to.
Like a cup of coffee that must be finished before it cools, this novel asks only one thing of its reader: presence. And in return, it offers something rare; comfort without sentimentality, magic without escape, and a blend of feelings that stays long after the last page.
Rating: ★★★
I only managed to score two books at the Manila International Book Fair because of the thick crowd. Imagine last week’s Travel Fair, then multiply that by three or four.
That’s a great thing, though, since it shows that book reading is still very much alive, especially among Gen Zs.
Here's a bit about what I bought.
According to its introduction, "Luzon and Mindanao" was first published in 1870, and written by Duc d’Alençon, a French traveler who was commissioned as an artillery man in the Spanish army.
Finally, I received the books I ordered from Big Bad Wolf Books last March.
It's all Asian lit:
- Silence by Shūsaka Endō
- Ticket to India by N.H. Senzai
- The Windfall by Diksha Basu
- Selection Day by Aravind Adiga
- Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana
But sadly, these books are not easily accessible nor available to most Filipinos today.
What are easily available to them are TikTok and Facebook history revisionism content.
Plus, our education system has faltered in promoting reading literacy and comprehension that most people today are easily swayed by fake narratives flooding the most accessible medium -- social media.
