Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Novel

By Lee Patton and Aamna Qureshi

For Ray O'Brien, a summer in London as part of his course in theatre was the chance of a lifetime. The presence of handsome Argentinian fellow student, Eduardo, promised to make it truly exceptional... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555834922
• ISBN13: 9781555834920
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Alyson Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 0.5" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Entertaining, keep-an-eye-out-behind-you, prowl in London

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" is an enormously enjoyable read - suspenseful, funny, sexy, descriptive and thought-provoking. Lovely to say its intelligence is nowhere stuffy, or set up in such as way as to impress the reader, rather than simply to entertain and intrigue. In fact, the first few pages read like an old-fashioned pot-boiler, and Nelson doesn't really hit his best stride until almost a third of the way through.I'm a regular mystery reader, who did not guess who the murderer was until a few pages before it was revealed. Don't really see how other reviewers knew. It really could have been ....Nelson keeps his readers concerned about the safety of his protagonist, Ray, who takes on the task of investigator when it becomes apparent that the police are being hounded by the press into possibly settling upon an innocent foreigner -- Ray's more-than-just-a-friend Eduardo -- instead of finding the real serial killer. Or is Eduardo really innocent?As other reviewers have noted, the story is enhanced by Nelson's descriptive writing and the trip to London that he gives to readers.I especially liked his descriptions of people. One character, Lily, "betrayed no outward signs of frazzlement on her pretty, 40-ish face. Under her soft,brown, indifferently bobbed hair, Lily always had an air of baffled yet determined self-possession, as if everything connected to her happened by accident. She seemed confident in her ability to shape order out of this chaos, then unsurprised when it slipped back into chaos."Ray sees one fellow student, Ursina, as a reflection of the "Old World's sour old soul.""Ursina was Europa herself, sleepwalking across a bedrock of indifference to suffering. She embodied Europe's premedieval tribal darkness, the selfishness it required to survive when your neighbor got bludgeoned by another neighbor in that cool deciduous jungle of ever-contested lands."This is good stuff. I identified with both these women.Nelson also does an extraordinary job of describing what the world looks like to a gay man -- a well-adjusted gay man, but one nevertheless who has been buffeted by the loss of so many friends to AIDS. He's also realistically wary of a Western culture whose contempt for "the homosexual lifestyle" is never far away. How long has that been the case? It's a question considered in "Nothing Gold Can Stay." This really isn't a run-of-the-mill mystery. Recommended for anyone looking for an intelligent, entertaining read -- and a visit to the gay bars and baths of London they might otherwise never see....

An Intelligent Mystery

I'm not a big mystery fan, so I DIDN'T guess the killer right away (and I'm not sure I believe those who say they did...), but I agree that the real pleasure of this novel is in the writing itself - Nelson's prose is fluid, his metaphors apt, and his insights into the position of the gay male in society at the turn of the millenium simply dead on target. His choice of the first person pulled me right in and made me a part of the experience - I've never been to London until now.