NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 ThereThe 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.
