Today, we’re pleased to reveal the cover art for Rinny Gremaud’s forthcoming novel Generator, translated by Holly James. Scheduled to be published by Schaffner Press on January 7, 2026, the novel tells a story of family secrets and nuclear power. The cover design is by Hollis Duncan. Here’s the publisher’s description:
In this first novel by Korean/Swiss journalist Rinny Gremaud, a woman’s search for her father, a former US engineer at international nuclear power facilities, provides the backdrop to this compelling personal journey that takes the reader not only into her turbulent family history, but explores the story of nuclear power generation from its origins in the post-WWII era to the present. With richly descriptive vignettes of the dormant or abandoned sites she visits, from Taiwan to Wales to the midwestern United States, the narrator reimagine her father’s life on this emotional journey in search of her own identity and sense of belonging in the world.
And here’s an excerpt from the novel itself:
I was born in 1977 at a nuclear power plant in the south of South Korea.
I never thought about things that way until that day in the summer of 2017, when I read an announcement that President Moon Jae-In was planning to phase out nuclear power, starting by pulling the plug on its oldest reactor, Kori 1. My reactor.
It was the symbolic end of an era, so they said. South Korea, which had entered the nuclear age and thus a period of modernity forty years prior, was now going to invest exclusively in renewable energies. End of story, curtain, new chapter.
South Korea was not the only country to question its relationship with atomic energy back then. Nor was it the first. In 2011, Fukushima had caused a groundswell in more ways than one. And besides, forty years is the average life expectancy of a nuclear power plant — in other words, the time the owners give themselves to recoup the costs. These infrastructures, if well-maintained and regularly serviced, have the potential to last beyond this arbitrary expiration date provided the right investments are made at the right time. But the world’s nuclear power plants, built primarily between the 1960s and 1980s, have been caught in a perpetual cycle of promises and setbacks, pawns in the shifting politics inherent in most industrialized democracies. At the time South Korea issued its statement, the majority of countries with nuclear facilities were faced with the decision of what to do with these gargantuan structures, as they charged en masse toward their official expiration date. The nuclear industry appeared to be having its midlife crisis.
It would be worth reflecting, I thought, on the end of this era: the first atomic age. The loss of industrial optimism, the belief in progress that once drove our societies, the power of the energy that rules our lives and governs our wealth. There is so much to say on the atomic dream, a nuclear utopia of turbine cathedrals, promises of heat and light expressed in megawatts, and the people who believed they were doing the right thing by making humanity a prisoner to comfort. So much to say, too, on the antinuclear faith, the new public and media consensus that went hand in hand with what had become a generalized and institutionalized mistrust of all forms of power, from science, through industry, to politics. Between 1977 and 2017, the world changed beyond recognition.
More than that, I realized that the shutdown of the Kori 1 reactor was a personal matter to me. The report from South Korea had unearthed something in the depths of my conscience, a sediment so old I thought it had turned to stone. With the power station coming to the end of its life, the outlines began shifting around the shadows of my past, the way the aftershock of a distant earthquake quietly dislodges the lid of a tomb that’s been sealed for centuries.
The announcement was timely, as I myself had just turned forty, and it resonated in a peculiar way, in a hollow tucked away somewhere in the bedrock of my identity. Perhaps the time had come for me, too, to declare the end of an era.