The Kindness of Women drew on the author's boyhood in Shanghai during World War II, presenting a lightly fictionalized treatment of Ballard's life from Shanghai through to adulthood in England, culminating with an account of the making of Steven Spielberg's 1987 film Empire of the Sun.

The Kindness of Women is semi-autobiographical, and discusses Jim's departure from China, where he had been born and had been interned, to visit England, other parts of Europe and the United States.

But his motives are strange: convinced that World War III is around the corner, he wants to be one of the bombers, carrying his own "pieces of the sun" to annihilate and, more importantly, to recapture the light he saw at the railway station, where the Chinese clerk died.

He finds happiness in his wife and children but, as a young father and husband in the 1960s, he becomes aware of a certain trend towards violence and the ever-intrusive camera lens.

The title refers to women who helped him after the death of his wife, but Jim's view of life is distorted and strange.