Some stories happen in a place. Others are shaped by it.
In Ian Hanes’s August: We Carry What We Bury, Lebanon, Kansas, is far more than a backdrop. The town carries memory, pride, prejudice, decline, community spirit and the weight of everything its people would rather forget. In many ways, Lebanon behaves like another character in the novel, watching, changing, remembering and influencing the lives of everyone within it.
When the story looks back at Lebanon’s beginnings, the town is presented as a place built by people who arrived with little more than determination and the belongings they could carry. Families settled the prairie, raised barns, worked the land and created a community around endurance. Later, Lebanon became known as the geographic center of the United States, giving the tiny town a symbolic importance far larger than its population.
But time changes places just as surely as it changes people.
By the period in which August Harper grows older, farms have consolidated, younger generations have moved away, businesses have disappeared and the local high school has closed. The town that once felt full of possibility becomes quieter and smaller.
That decline gives August’s story an added emotional layer.
As a teenager in 1977, August is one of Lebanon’s brightest hopes. He is the basketball star of the Lebanon Bronchos and during the team’s championship run, the town comes alive. The gym fills. People gather. Newspapers begin paying attention. For a community used to being overlooked, basketball offers a chance to feel important again.
The team’s success becomes the town’s success.
Yet Lebanon also contains something less comforting: judgment.
Rose, the Black teenager who falls in love with August, understands how closely people watch one another. She knows that simply being seen with a white boy could become the subject of gossip. Their relationship therefore grows in private moments, glances at school, conversations after basketball practice and quiet time together when no one else is around.
The town can celebrate August while making Rose feel she must remain almost invisible.
That contradiction is important.
Lebanon is capable of tremendous warmth. The novel remembers community traditions, neighbors helping one another, local gatherings and stories of people coming together when someone needs support. But the same closeness that creates belonging can also create pressure. Everyone knows everyone. History lingers. Rumors travel quickly.
After Rose’s death, that atmosphere becomes even more significant. August remains in Lebanon rather than pursuing the future basketball once seemed ready to give him. He stays on the farm, grows older and quietly carries his grief in the same landscape where his happiest and most painful memories began.
The town changes around him, but it never stops holding those memories.
That is what makes Lebanon feel alive in August: We Carry What We Bury.
Its empty buildings, basketball history, farms, church, cemetery, roads and traditions all carry pieces of the people who lived there. The town remembers victories and tragedies even when the people themselves struggle to speak about them.
Ian Hanes uses this small Kansas community to show that places can carry the past too.
People bury memories.
Towns do the same.
And sometimes, all it takes is one story to bring them back to the surface.
Discover August: We Carry What We Bury by Ian Hanes, available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3M2GCJJ/
