Wintersong

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.

Mick Lowe is a prolific journalist, writer, and newspaper columnist, and author of the true crime classic Conspiracy of Brothers. The first two volumes of the Nickel Range Trilogy, The Raids and The Insatiable Maw appeared in 2014 and 2015. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario.