Loved this. Solid plot. Strong character development. Wonderfully atmospheric. Pretty compulsive read.

Cafés are a very important part of Viennese daily life, and I learnt that Unesco has even recognized Viennese coffee house culture as part of the inventory of intangible cultural heritage. It really deserved a novel (or more than one!).

I feel that the writer wanted us to be like people eavesdropping on someone’s conversation at the next table of a café. I loved the idea, but unfortunately I didn’t fall in love with the result. We get glimpses of different people and their stories over the course of the years they regularly come to the café from the early 1960s on, but I didn’t feel very engaged with any of them.

What I enjoyed though was the atmosphere of a city that at first is still reeling from the aftermaths of the war. The café is dirty and dark, in a poor neighborhood near a market with fishmongers and patronized by factory workers. Little by little, just as the café gets cleaned up and a fresh coat of paint, we feel that the city is full of new energy, there are construction sites and modernization. Some part of old Vienna disappear and people grow older and change.

Overall it was a pleasant, melancholy reading experience, not quite unforgettable, but it made me want to return to Vienna once more!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

I'd seen this author's name in book prize longlists, so I knew this might be a good book, and I was not disappointed. This story follows the birth, development and death of a cafe that provides a social space in an Austrian neighborhood after the close of WW2. The main character, Simon, has always wanted a cafe of his own, so when the local cafe is left abandoned after the war, he picks up the lease on it and reopens the cafe. Over the years is serves as a meeting space for all sorts of people and serves as the setting for all sorts of dramas. The book follows the various people whose lives connect through the cafe, which remains the common thread to the very end. This is a very satisfying and elegantly written short novel, and I enjoyed reading it.

Often I felt lost when reading The Cafe' with No Name. I wanted to like this novel. I've been to Vienna and loved it. I have a friend in Austria. I know she loves to read, I was thinking "buddy read". I feel like something might have been lost in translation. I felt that everything would come together in the end ... and I did like the last 10% of the book best.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4 stars because of the ending. (Although I was quite sure for most of the book that this would be 3 stars, I'm a softy with my stars.)

What is the book about? A man who makes a Cafe a warm and inviting place in the community and the people who come and go and support his efforts.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Robert Seethaler (author) and Europa Editions for approving my request to read the advance read copy of The Cafe with No Name in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is Feb 25, 2025, approx 190 pages.

gorgeously introspective but very stoic in a way i'm not sure works, although it fits the feel of an old B/W movie this book is going for. 3.5 rounded up. tysm for the arc.

A pleasant read, but I didn't become as invested in the characters as I expected from other reviews. I wondered sometimes about the translator's choices -- there were some odd words sprinkled in, but perhaps that was a reflection of odd words used in the German. I also found it strange that the vanished, murdered Jews of Vienna were never once mentioned. (In 1938 there were over 200,000, in 1951 9000). One time only there is an offhand comment that half the people in Vienna are Nazis. But otherwise, the war that is sometimes mentioned as being in the recent past could have no connection with the Holocaust. Maybe this was an intentional comment on people's wish to forget an uncomfortable past? I just found it strange, as characters in the book would surely have known many Jews -- including café owners.

This book was a bit slow for me. It was still good and I was able to read through it, but it had lots of pills and parts that just didn’t get me excited to read on. I think the writing was decent, the characters were okay, but it was just ok not that great for me

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!

Beginning in 1966 and spanning the next ten years, this story follows Robert Simon as he opens a cafe in post war Vienna. A character in the story as much as a setting, Vienna shifts and evolves as it modernizes. Against this backdrop, The Cafe With No Name provides a haven for those who the city threatens to leave behind.

While a quieter story with a slower pace than I initially expected, several of the characters stayed with me long after the book ended.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

I come neither to praise this book or bury it. It's okay.
It's a nicely written story set in a down at heel part of Vienna. The fact that the author kept causing bad things to happen to all the central characters left me feeling bereft and sad. I imagine the story is realistic, but I look to stories for escape from how depressing life can be!