There are moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after.
For August Harper and Rosalind “Rose,” that moment comes in 1977.
At the heart of Ian Hanes’s August: We Carry What We Bury is a young love story shaped by hope, prejudice, ambition and a tragedy neither of them sees coming. August is a gifted basketball player from Lebanon, Kansas, a small town where opportunities are limited but expectations can still feel enormous. Rose is a bright, determined Black teenager with plans far beyond the life others seem willing to imagine for her.
Together, they begin to dream.
August has talent. He is good enough to hope for a basketball scholarship at the University of Kansas and for a while, the future seems wide open. Rose has dreams of becoming a civil rights lawyer and possibly entering public service. When August jokes that she should aim even higher, she laughs at the thought of becoming president. His response is simple but revealing: maybe the world needs turning upside down.
Their relationship grows quietly.
In public, they are careful. In a small Kansas town in the 1970s, a Black girl and a white boy know exactly what people might say. So their connection develops in glances, conversations after basketball practice, brief touches and moments stolen from a world that does not make things easy for them.
That makes the night of the championship even more devastating.
The Lebanon Bronchos are playing for the state title. August is inside the arena, surrounded by noise, possibility and the biggest opportunity of his young life. Rose is trying desperately to get there.
She has been delayed. She catches a later bus. When she arrives in Hays, she discovers the arena is still some distance away.
So she runs.
She runs because she wants to see August. She runs because this night matters to him. She runs because sometimes love makes a person believe they can outrun time itself.
Then everything changes.
A car strikes Rose before she reaches the arena. The driver is Calvin Routeforth Meyde III, who has been drinking. Rose dies while the championship celebration continues in the distance.
Inside, August and his teammates win.
It should have been the beginning of his future.
Instead, it becomes the end of the life he once imagined.
When August hears that a girl has been killed, he searches the crowd and realizes Rose is missing. College scouts later come with scholarships and opportunities, but August turns them away. Grief changes his direction completely.
That contrast gives August: We Carry What We Bury much of its emotional power: a boy standing on the edge of possibility, a girl dreaming of changing the world and one terrible night that reshapes everything.
Ian Hanes turns their story into something larger than tragedy. It becomes a reflection on memory, love, lost potential and the invisible burdens people carry for decades.
Because sometimes the future does not disappear all at once.
Sometimes it changes in a single night.
Discover August: We Carry What We Bury by Ian Hanes, available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3M2GCJJ/
