Beginning on a small tobacco farm in North Carolina shortly after World War II and ranging to the Smoky Mountains, South Carolina's Grand Strand, Charleston, Richmond, and beyond, Nothing Gold Can Stay, which borrows its title from the title of a Robert Frost poem, is a novel of childhood innocence, an inward journey, betrayal, lost friendship and lost love. The novel is narrated by three of its principal characters: Jamey, a farm boy who journeys from an idyllic childhood into the world of adulthood and its confusing choices; Mike, Jamey's childhood hero, a mill worker and World War II veteran who longs to be off the mill floor and out in the mountains he loves; and Jennyree, his bored and restless wife, who is Jamey's older cousin.