Welcome to the café that never sleeps.
Day and night, Stella’s Café opens its doors to the lonely and the lost, the morning people and the night owls. It’s a place where everyone is always welcome, where life can wait at the door.
Meet Hannah and Mona: best friends, waitresses, dreamers. They love working at Stella’s – the different people they meet, the small kindnesses exchanged. But is it time to step outside and make their own way in life?
Come inside and spend twenty-four hours at Stella’s Café, where one day might just be enough to change your life . . .
My thoughts:
Having read the author’s previous book, The Lido, I was looking forward to this as that book was light and heartwarming, with its story of intergenerational friendship and community.
This is a different kind of community, and at its heart is a long running friendship between two waitresses, who are also a dancer and a musician.
Hannah and Mona are flatmates, and have been for some time, they work in the cafe, watching its customers come and go, wondering about the lives they lead, while trying to get their creative careers off the ground.
We get little snippets of the lives of their regulars, and new faces as they come in, order their food and take a moment to sit and savour the day.
But it is Hannah and Mona’s book really, and their friendship’s history is told in the women’s reflections as they stand behind the counter in the cafe, across a single 24 hours.
I really enjoyed this, I liked the central characters, I’ve known the central characters, and I thought the way their story was interwoven with the stories of the people around them was really effective and interesting. Everyone has a story, and this was a great way of demonstrating that.
This was a comforting read, reflecting real life but in a good way, reminding us that even as over time we change, some things stay the same.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 