ROSE CARTER is dead, but her gaze endures. From the quiet edges of the afterlife, a sharp-tongued, big-hearted Black girl watches the man who loved her, the child who will inherit her absence, and the hidden threads linking Kansas to Beirut and Baghdad.
AUGUST HARPER, once a rising basketball star, abandons his future after Rose's death and retreats to the family farm, carrying a grief that hardens into silence.
When an infant boy, John, is left on his porch, August raises him with the same tenderness and restraint that shaped his own life.
Across the world, LAYLA, an Iraqi-Lebanese woman shaped by dictatorship, war and displacement, builds a life in Beirut until the 2020 port explosion forces her to confront her own buried grief.
Told through shifting perspectives that move from a Kansas cornfield to a Baghdad street to a Beirut hospital, August: We Carry What We Bury is a novel about the threads that bind us across continents and griefs. It asks whether love can outlast death - and whether the dead, in watching, can still change the lives of the living.
For readers of The House of Broken Angels and The God of Small Things, this is a story for anyone who has ever lost someone and wondered if they were still seen. Rose is watching.
The question is whether August and Layla can feel her there.
