 nothing gold can stay by ron rash if the purpose of a review is to assist the reader in selecting a good book then really all i need write here is read this book  read everything he has written scoop up all his books secrete yourself in a quiet room and then emerge pale shaken and amazed ron rash has written several novels and short story collections all set in the harsh small towns of the appalachians and nothing gold can stay is surely his finest the landscape is magnificent but has been brutalised by poverty and barbed wire the earth scarred by desperate farming brokendown trucks and withered crops it is a degraded environment which stamps itself on your psyche as you read in this setting are people some menacing some cruel some utterly driedup and hopeless but also some with a spark of ingenuity courage and humour and who battle to keep that spark burning even though his stories are set where the landscape and the poverty never change they leap tirelessly from theme to theme and from era to era in the opening story the trusty we are in familiar territory with a convict plotting his escape from a chain gang then we jump forward in time to the title story and see two highschool dropouts who ll do anything to fund their drug habit the dowry is a shocking civil war story about a young couple desperate to marry but the girl s father objects an appalling sacrifice is needed to compel him to finally relent then we skip in time to cherokee and follow a desperate young couple as they gamble their last dollars at the casino to fend off the threatened repossession of their truck the finest story in the collection is where the map ends we see two escaped slaves stumble across the farm of a white man who is raging and bitter at the loss of his son in the civil war this horrific story of misguided revenge had an understated power which stayed with me all day and refused to be shaken off ron rash has been compared to cormac mccarthy and raymond carver they share that same paredback strippedbare style which is quietly resonant and packs a solid punch it is no exaggeration to place him alongside these american greats i sum up this review in the only way i can read this book read this book nothing gold can stay is published by canongate book review nothing gold can stay ron rash archive r 