It’s September, 1978 and the 11,700 hard rock miners and smelter and refinery workers of Inco’s Sudbury operations face a stark choice: remain on the job without a contract or take seemingly suicidal strike action against a hard-nosed employer that’s accumulated a nickel stockpile vast enough to last a year without further production. A fateful choice is made, one that will change the lives of newlyweds Jake and Jo Ann McCool and the Canadian labor movement forever. Against a backdrop of unrelenting winter and swirling changes in social mores, the ensuing struggle triggers epical challenges few could have foreseen. The third and final volume of Mick Lowe’s sweeping Nickel Range Trilogy,
Wintersong
, is working class literature at its best, echoing the great tradition of writers like Upton Sinclair, Theodor Dreiser, Steinbeck and Dos Passos.