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Returning to Café Funiculi Funicula for the fourth time felt much like visiting a familiar local cafe (without the time travel). I knew the dim underground ambience, the mysterious woman reading in the special chair and the rules governing every journey to the past.

My main reservation, again, is the repetition. By this point in the series, I know the rules of the café extremely well. I knew them by the second explanation in this book, yet they continue to be restated. The same is true of the emotional structure. A visitor arrives carrying grief or regret. A meeting reveals information they didn't previously understand. The facts remain the same, but the visitor comes back able to face life differently.

Most time-travel fiction is concerned with consequences. A character changes one detail in the past and returns to discover an different present, but Kawaguchi removes that possibility entirely.

Meghann Dontess can dismantle a marriage before lunch, stare down an abusive husband by mid-afternoon and still have no idea how to speak honestly to her own sister.

Matt Haig has built a career around asking deceptively simple questions. What if you could live another life? What if you could revisit your regrets? What if you had one final opportunity to understand the person you became? In The Midnight Train, he returns to familiar territory, but instead of exploring the lives we never lived, he examines the life we already have—and the quiet choices that slowly shape it.

One of the things I adored was how completely the Australian landscape becomes part of the story. Meredith Downs doesn't simply provide a backdrop; it influences every choice the characters make. The isolation, the relentless distances, the dependence on neighbours, the vulnerability to drought, and later the arrival of the mining industry all create a world that feels authentic rather than romanticised. You can almost feel the dust settling over everything.

Although the mystery is compelling, this is really a novel about grief. Not simply the grief of losing a child, but the grief of losing certainty.