Intergenerational novels have a special way of showing how one life can shape another. They reveal how love, grief, silence and family history move across time, often influencing people who do not yet understand what came before them. Ian Hanes’ August: We Carry What We Bury offers exactly this kind of emotionally layered storytelling.
At the centre of the novel is August Harper, a gifted basketball player growing up in Lebanon, Kansas, during the 1970s. As a teenager, August appears destined for a promising future. His talent attracts attention, his community celebrates him and a college scholarship seems within reach.
However, his life is forever changed by Rose Carter.
Rose is intelligent, ambitious and determined to become a civil rights lawyer. She and August develop a quiet relationship in a town where racism makes their love difficult to express openly. Their connection grows through private conversations, shared hopes and moments after basketball practice when they can briefly escape the judgment of others.
When Rose dies while trying to reach August’s championship game, the future they imagined disappears. August’s grief does not remain a single tragic chapter from his youth. It follows him into adulthood and shapes the choices that define the rest of his life.
This is where the novel’s intergenerational depth begins.
August turns away from basketball opportunities and remains on his family farm. Years later, he becomes a father to John and raises him with the patience, loyalty and quiet strength he learned from his own mother and grandfather. John inherits his father’s connection to the land, his sense of justice and his natural ability on the basketball court.
Yet he also grows up surrounded by parts of August’s past that remain unspoken.
That emotional inheritance makes their relationship especially compelling. August loves his son deeply, but his protectiveness is shaped by old loss. John may not initially know the complete story of Rose, but he lives with the effects of it. Ian Hanes shows how children often inherit more than family names, property or physical traits. They can also inherit silence, fear, unfinished grief and values created by experiences they never witnessed.
The novel expands this idea beyond the Harper family. In Baghdad and Beirut, Layla’s life is shaped by her father’s disappearance, her mother’s courage, political violence in Iraq and the experience of displacement. She carries these memories into the family she later builds with Bahri and their son, Malik.
Like John, Malik belongs to a younger generation whose identity is connected to histories that began before his birth. His family’s experiences of migration, survival and rebuilding become part of what he inherits.
By moving between Kansas, Iraq and Lebanon, August shows that intergenerational trauma and love are not limited to one family or culture. Different characters carry lost homes, missing relatives, hidden relationships and painful truths. Still, they also pass down resilience, compassion, humour and the determination to create better lives.
Readers who enjoy family sagas will appreciate how the novel reveals its connections gradually. Earlier events gain new meaning as younger characters uncover what has been buried. The past is never simply background; it remains active within the present.
August: We Carry What We Bury is a moving choice for readers who value stories about family legacy, historical memory and emotional inheritance. Ian Hanes reminds us that every generation receives something from the one before it and that understanding those hidden stories may be the first step toward healing them.
