In 1970, screenwriter Winston Barber comes to Cape Breton to seek out stories that might make good movies. In Glace Bay, he discovers welcome and confrontation, community and conflict, and stories galore...including one in which he finds himself playing the lead.

With this book, Jeremy Akerman returns to the scene of his first novel, Black Around the Eyes. In that book, set in the 1920s, Glace Bay is riding the boom of coal production, and the workers struggle for their fair share of the results. By 1970, Cape Breton coal is well into its long decline, and the action is more often at the pensioners' hall than at the colliery. But some issues, and some passions, do not change.