Martyr!: A novel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW - A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

"Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever." --Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of There There

"The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness." --Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past--toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning--in faith, art, ourselves, others.

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352 pages

Average rating: 7.5

58 RATINGS

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5 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Anonymous
Oct 15, 2024
8/10 stars
I love a novel that draws me in immediately like this one did. 'Martyr' had some really high points, but also had moments where the story would jump around that I felt a little disconnected too. This one was a 3.9/5
fionaian
Sep 30, 2024
6/10 stars
I think this was a very original story about a queer Iranian man finding meaning from his life's traumas and in art. It's always fascinating on writing about a flawed protagonist who struggles to find their way in life, and in the case of the character Cyrus Shams, he seeks answers sometimes in the wrong places. His journey is quite colorful without spoiling the rest of the book.
Anonymous
Jul 05, 2024
10/10 stars
Loved this book! So many sentences in here I want to save, and savor, and cry that I couldn't put words together like that. Pure genius.

Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American who grew up in Indiana with his father. When he was just a few months old and they were still living in Iran, his mother was on a plane that was shot down in a supposed accident by the American military. His grief-stricken father packs him up and starts a new life in America.

Cyrus grows up in the shadows of this loss and grief and even as a child has trouble sleeping and issues of depression. He is a poet and a writer but also an alcoholic and addict, in recovery. Again. He is searching for the meaning of life. He learns about an artist who is putting on her final show at Brooklyn Museum. She is dying, and she's going to share her dying with museum visitors. He decides he needs to go and meet her. He is inspired to write about martyrs, who have made a meaning of their life through death. He meets the artist, Orkideh, and she seemingly wants to talk to him longer than other visitors, asks him to come back. He comes back every day and is at once inspired and deflated by her.

Incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking, but also at times funny and entertaining. A masterpiece.
JCousin
Apr 21, 2024
7/10 stars
Interesting book, some great descriptive writing. Lots of sadness about love and death. Surprising twist toward the end as everything comes full circle.
brittshank91
Mar 25, 2024
10/10 stars
I knew the end of the book was coming before it did, and I dreaded it even more then than I did when I read the last word. But this book, like all good (and bad) things, must end. And beautifully it did.

It’s been a long time since I’ve instantly fell in love with the writing of an author that I’d never read before. Kaveh made the comment during a reading I attended that “He was in no place to judge or review his book” and I think the reviews do that for him.

Beautiful written. Wonderfully composed. All around satisfying. As he told me in a conversation we were lucky to have - “Gifts, gifts, gifts! All of them!”

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