NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • 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. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR “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.

Martyr! is a novel about Cyrus, a young Iranian-American man in Indiana going through recovery from alcohol addiction and finding his way to New York to research a book about martyrs and contemplate the meaning of his own life. That recovery is the center of the book and as we learn about what happened to Cyrus's mother, father, uncle, and their communities, Akbar paints a story of different kinds of sacrifice and ways to live a valuable life. A lot of us were sour on the book with the conversation started, largely due to structural reasons. Cyrus is not a likeable character, given his selfishness and obliviousness to others, and that put off a lot of NUBClub for the first half of the novel. Some of us didn't like the perspectives taken in the story, specifically the fact that Akbar both gives us Cyrus's fantasies of conversations with other characters and then inexplicably tells the story from their perspectives, even though the majority of the story is Cyrus's internality. All of these were basically editing issues in our mind, and we wished the author had shown a bit more constraint. But when we looked harder at the themes of the book (as Melanie encouraged us to), we started to see what a powerfully consistent story Akbar was telling. Cyrus's recovery from drug abuse is the center of the story, his process to find a way to live after losing the chemically induced meaning of euphoric highs. His interest in martyrdom is romanticized way of finding meaning by not living, but the actual martyrs of the story (his dad sacrificing his life to work for Cyrus's future, his uncle serving as a performer in the Iranian army to give dying soldiers faith, his mother's sacrifices in a repressive Tehran) provide another way of thinking about meaning. The artist Cyrus goes to see in NYC who is dying in the museum becomes another counterpoint that both in plot and in spirit pushes Cyrus to reconsider his perspective. And all of this is done with some really beautiful writing. Akbar gets caught in the structure of his novel sometimes, but when he finds his groove, we get beautiful moments -- Cyrus's uncle as a angel on the battlefield, a great relationship with a flawed sponsor in AA, a sweet and complex loving relationship between Cyrus and his roommate Zee -- alongside genuinely funny moments where the writing soars. The book's conclusion takes a flight of fancy that was a bit confusing, but has breathtaking beauty and leads to a perfectly mundane coda that ties everything together. This is clearly a first novel and suffers from some of the problematic maximalism that first novels can, but where Akbar succeeds, it's amazing, and for that reason, most of NUBClub would recommend Martyr! It's a quick read that does a great job with a tight, compelling theme.