Sudbury, 1963. Jake McCool, 19 ans, découvre l’enfer des mines de nickel et les luttes syndicales en pleine Guerre froide.

Jake McCool, the injured hard-rock miner introduced in The Raids (Vol. 1), returns to work for INCO, but now at its nearby Copper Cliff smelter complex. In no time, he finds himself embroiled in a vicious fight over health and safety. Particularly alarming are the extreme levels of sulphur dioxide that poison the air in the smelter but also in the entire surrounding area, thus creating Sudbury's infamous "lunar landscape." The fight takes on new dimensions when free-lance reporter Foley Gilpin, who had worked for the Mine Mill union in The Raids, sparks attention at The Globe & Mail. At the same time local parliamentarian Harry Wardell smells high-level collusion between Inco and the government at Queen's Park in Toronto. Through the lives of Jake and his girlfriend Jo Ann Winters, their roommate Foley Gilpin, and a new cast of characters, Mick Lowe chronicles an entire community's eco-defiance.

September 1978. 11,700 hard rock miners and smelter and refinery workers at Inco's Sudbury operations face a stark choice. Should they remain on the job? Or take seemingly suicidal strike action against a huge multinational that has stocked up enough nickel to last a year? A fateful choice is made. It changes the lives of newlyweds Jake and Jo Ann McCool and the Canadian labour 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 it's best, echoing the great tradition of writers like Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Steinbeck and Dos Passos.