Café for Two by Hasmik Mkhitaryan: book review

Hasmik Mkhitaryan’s Café for Two: Decoding Masculinity – What Men Live By (2024) is set in Manhattan and is a conversation over coffee between two elderly male friends on Wall Street.

They discuss work burnout, loss of love, the weariness of divorce, and loneliness. A chapter is dedicated to each emotional phase. As they talk, they make intellectual references to classical literary novels and society’s changing norms, particularly what masculinity means in the modern age.

I like the strong introduction to the novel, setting a powerful atmosphere of the bond between the two men. I like the dialogue between them. Sometimes, it feels scripted and repetitive, but overall, the tone is conversational storytelling in a gentle, philosophical way – sometimes sad, but always open and honest.

To each other, they have nothing to hide. Their emotional pain is raw and real. The narrator’s friend talks of keeping up appearances and expectations in the professional world, and says, “On Wall Street, emotions are buttoned up tight … Show weakness, and you’re like chum in shark-infested waters.”

I like this emotional novel for showing vulnerability in relationship disconnections and the insightful depiction of men’s struggles in coming to terms with life changing loss of status and identity. At the same time, Café For Two is poetic and poignant.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

MARTINA NICOLLS is an Australian author and international human rights-based consultant in foreign aid evaluations and audits, education, psychosocial support, resilience, peace and stabilization, and communication, including script writing and voice work. She lives in Paris. Her latest books are: If Paris Were My Lover (2025) and Innovations within Constraints Handbook (2025). She is the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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