August: We carry what we bury

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. Read more