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After five books, the repetition is finally bothering me. Every visitor is given the same rules, every cup of coffee creates the same countdown and every story is shaped towards a final emotional revelation. Even the characters’ hesitations and the explanations surrounding the journey have begun to feel overly familiar. I understand that repetition is part of the café’s ritual, but I'm now too aware of the construction underneath each story.

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.

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.

Ayesha Inoon’s The Sisters of Serendib begins with a family torn apart before its youngest members are old enough to understand what they've lost. In 1990, three sisters flee war-torn Sri Lanka with their mother aboard a boat bound for Australia. When their mother dies during the journey, Janu, Samar and Maryam are separated and raised by different families across the country.

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you wonder whether you've been telling yourself the wrong stories about your own life.

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.