Germinal [UN, NC] - You don't need to have read Zola to work here, but it helps.

[Ramster]

No, not the Belgian football club, the celebrated novel by Émile Zola.

Taking place in the fictional mining town of Montsou in the far north of France in the 1860s, the novel covers a miner's strike and its violent aftermath, as well as their gritty and promiscuous sex lives. It'll help if you've read the book; it'll be fun to have a lot of characters who at least share the names of the miners, for one thing, but this will be a fairly loose adaptation and should be easy enough to play by ear. Characters needed will be miners, young and old, some interesting characters added to the mix, like Souvarine the anarchist, the hated jobsworth foreman of the mine, and the greedy patrician owners of the mine. There's plenty to look up about the book on the internet.

I'll leave this idea here to brew for now, and will start recruiting more aggressively as well as elaborating on this interest check if people just seem to stare and wonder what the hell I'm talking about.

[AlexStone]

I haven't had a chance to read the novel, but I know of it and like historical work, so, I'm interested.