Kindness Power Plant
In this town, electricity is made from human kindness. Everyone knows it. Everyone is proud of it. Nobody has ever seen it happen.
Thomas is a collector. Every day he walks the town in yellow coveralls and a green cap, gathering fragments of kindness - a feather from a rescued pigeon, a fish bone from a stray cat's meal - and carries them back to the Kindness Power Plant in the machine strapped to his back. The town that was reduced to ash in the war is now the cleanest, richest city in the country. The electricity is free. The children run up to him in the street to look inside his Suctor.
He is not a good collector. He earns barely enough to feed his family, and when his great-aunt is admitted to hospital he cannot pay for the operation. So he does what he has always avoided: he starts calling on the Off-Grids - the lamp-maker who refuses to use electricity, the rancher whose workers have broken down under round-the-clock shifts, the crank in the woods with a dog the size of a bear.
They are not the frightening people he was told about. They simply know something.
What Thomas learns, from an old fixer in the underworld and a scientist dying in a hospital bed and a physicist nobody will speak to, is that the plant runs on almost nothing but a lie, that his father did not die in an accident, and that the residue burned off every day is being sold abroad under another name. And that the men who built all of it - heroes with statues in the square - began with nothing but the wish to save the town they were born in.
Kindness Power Plant is a novel about the cost of comfort: about what a society agrees not to look at in exchange for a good life, about power that is acquired for good reasons and cannot be given up, and about a young man who has to decide whether telling the truth to people who did not ask for it makes him a hero or something much worse.
This is a new English translation, fully revised from the original edition.
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