Follow a Child on His Journey to Resilience and Bravery in this Atmospheric Novel
By: Elena Mart
We all have been so busy, busy in the relentless noise and hyper-accelerated digital culture, that we limit ourselves from enjoying the beauty of life. If only we stopped to see the beauty of existence, maybe we could find our voice again. Ian Hanes, a writer whose literary and artistic work is cataloged at ianhanes.com, has delivered a profound meditation on memory, place, and the invisible threads that bind our lives together in his latest novel, August: We Carry What We Bury.
For readers who crave storytelling with moral weight, emotional resonance, and a distinctly human pulse, Hanes’s novel marries the poetic cadence of regional American fiction with a sweeping, global historical consciousness, and it suggests that the smallest towns often hold the deepest truths.
The Geographic and Emotional Center of Lebanon, Kansas
The novel opens in Lebanon, Kansas, a small Midwestern town of 178 souls, and the officially designated geographic center of the contiguous United States. It is a place where “time folds itself like laundry, neat and strange”. Hanes employs a daring, haunting narrative device: a deceased young woman who watches over the town with omniscient, tender grief. She narrates the town’s trajectory from its optimistic settlement in 1876 through the crushing blows of the Great Depression and the slow, inevitable hemorrhaging of its youth to the coasts.
At the pulsing heart of this fading town is August, a boy born in August 1959, named by a teenage mother who believed an entire month belonged to him. Raised by a stoic, pious grandfather on the prairie, August grows into the golden boy of Lebanon and becomes the basketball star who, in the unforgettable winter of 1977, leads the Lebanon Bronchos to a Kansas 1A State Championship.
But not every victory changes life drastically, and it is no different for August. Even the triumph of the 1977 championship brings quiet heartbreak as unbridled potential leads to tragic circumstances. When a budding, unspoken romance between August and the narrator, a young Black girl whose family’s bus broke down in Kansas on their way to Chicago, the story is cut short by a senseless accident. From there, we see how the novel deepens and becomes an exploration of how a community carries grief, how secrets settle into the dust of Main Street, and how love persists long after life has flickered out.
What elevates Hanes’s writing above standard rural drama is its rich intertextual fabric. The ghost-narrator watches as Bruce Springsteen passes through Lebanon, stepping into the small church at the geographic center of the nation, capturing the sacred, working heart of America. Springsteen’s presence serves as a thematic anchor: a recognition that places left behind by the modern world are not empty, but simply “waiting for someone to listen, waiting for someone to remember”.
Hanes also weaves historical parallels through the text, notably invoking Founding Father John Adams. Just as Adams was a farmer who returned again and again to the soil of Braintree, Massachusetts, August remains tethered to his land and fights bitterly yet maintains a profound intellectual kinship with the generational cycles of ordinary men trying to do right by their children.
When August later finds an infant boy, also named John, left on his porch with a battered toy tractor, the novel expands its thematic scope, and we see how August becomes a protective father figure. He raises young John with dignity and steady hands he learned from his own grandfather, even as new storms gather on the horizon of the 21st century.
From the American Prairie to the Shores of Beirut
In its second half, Hanes’s narrative executes a breathtaking geographical leap, connecting the Kansas prairie to the vibrant, scarred streets of Beirut, Lebanon, and the ancient river valleys of Iraq. By juxtaposing the Phoenician history of seafaring cities, such as Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and Arwad, with modern political turmoil, Hanes reminds us that humanity has always been shaped by what we carry across water.
We meet characters like Bahri Haddad, a Beirut fisherman whose life is anchored by the rhythmic tides of the Mediterranean, and his wife Layla, whose childhood was forged in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Through Layla’s harrowing escape from Baghdad during the 2003 coalition invasion, the novel examines the contradictions of life under authoritarian rule, where fear and opportunity could sit side by side within the same household.
The convergence of these disparate worlds and the quiet Kansas farm where August faces his mortality and the bustling, fragile fish markets of Beirut creates a symphonic resonance. Hanes also illustrates that human suffering, resilience, and love are universal languages, even though they vary from person to person. Whether it is a farmer tending corn in the geographic center of America or a mother fleeing across a war-torn border with a vial of insulin, the human spirit struggles against the same fundamental currents.
A Debut Built on the Strength of Its Narrator
One Goodreads reviewer singled out the book’s voice as its most remarkable achievement, describing the narrator’s reflections from beyond death as “poetic and profoundly moving” and hearing echoes of Kahlil Gibran in the novel’s sense that life and death are inseparable companions.
The prose is lyrical yet unpretentious, which allows readers to be steeped in the sensory details of damp earth, diesel fumes, cedar salt, and prairie wind. Plus, how the story is narrated captures the cadence of rural speech without mockery and the weight of geopolitical trauma without abstraction.
For literary fiction readers looking for their next sanctuary, the novel asks them to look closer at an often overlooked corner of the world, to respect the historical weight carried by ordinary people, and to sit with the idea that even in the face of grief, aging, and historical upheaval, love, resilience, and hope remain “an ever-fixed mark”.
Hanes has crafted a global epic rooted in ordinary lives, the places that hold them, and the grief they carry.
The novel is available in ebook, hardcover, and paperback editions. Readers can also register their details at ianhanes.com for updates, reviews, press releases, and news on his future releases, including his next book, A Passage of Time.
About the Author
Ian Hanes is a historian‑novelist from the wind‑scoured slopes of Mynydd Bodafon on Anglesey, where the quiet weight of landscape shapes both his life and his fiction. A former university lecturer and headteacher, he brings a scholar’s eye for human truth to stories rooted in family, resilience, and the small acts of courage that define ordinary lives. His work blends dust‑warm lyricism with wry humor, drawing on decades of teaching, parenting, and historical study to craft narratives that feel lived‑in and deeply human.
Book Details
Book Name: August: We carry what we bury
Author Name: Ian Hanes
ISBN Number: 979-8950750250
Ebook Version: Click Here
Hardcover Version: Click Here
Paperback Version: Click Here
