Set against the terrifying fall of Kabul in 2021, Deborah Rodriguez concludes her bestselling Little Coffee Shop trilogy with a heart-stopping story of resilience, courage and, most importantly, hope. Farewell to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul is the new and final novel in the bestselling Little Coffee Shop series.
Sunny Tedder is back in her beloved coffee shop. After eight years away, she’s thrilled to reunite with her Kabul ‘family’.
Yazmina now runs a pair of women’s shelters from the old cafe, and dreams of a bright future for her two young daughters.
Her sister Layla has become an outspoken women’s rights activist and, thanks to social media, is quite the celebrity.
Kat, Sunny’s friend from America, is wrapping up her year-long stay in the land of her birth, but is facing some unfinished business.
And finally there’s elderly den mother Halajan, whose secret new hobby is itself an act of rebellion.
Then the US troops begin to withdraw – and the women watch in horror as the Taliban advance on the capital at ferocious speed…
The final instalment in the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul series is uplifting and touching, rich and rare, heart-thumping and at times heartbreaking. There is love in every chapter and every paragraph of this book. A love that, as Deborah Rodriguez says in the title dedication, is for the refugees of the world.
This novel is a call to the hope that we might never give up. And that’s what unfolds over the pages of Farewell to Little Coffee Shop of Kabul. Picking up from book #2, we journey with each of the characters as they reel from and deal with their homes being taken over by the Taliban – their freedoms withdrawn and their privacy invaded.
Rodriguez did not intend to write this book. In the author’s note, she tells us she thought she’d said goodbye to each of her beloved characters at the conclusion of Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul. But following the fall of Kabul in August 2021, she began to hear each of her characters asking, ‘What about us?’. And perhaps it’s because this is the place that Farewell to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul is written from that it is all the more heartfelt and courageous.
The novel moves quickly and has equal measures of poignancy and suspense, always with an underlying sense familial strength, in all its forms. There’s also some gorgeous Afghani recipes at the novel’s end, including one for Cardamom Almond Brittle that I am very keen to try out. It’s a great recipe to sum up Farewell to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul… finding sweetness in the most brittle of circumstances.
Buy a copy of Farewell to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul here.
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