A brilliant and blisteringly alive novel about not just how we go on, but also why. Kaveh Akbar's first novel is so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe. I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life." —John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
"I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. The language moves across the page like a symphony, and the story vibrates with an energy that made the book impossible to put down. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever. What a story. What a voice. What a gift.” —Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed
“Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. MARTYR! is the best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come, and in all over your brain, and straight from the bottom of your heart. This book does everything. It is so entirely funny and sad and true and beautiful. Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.”
—Tommy Orange, author of There There
“Kaveh Akbar has given birth to a hilarious marvel of a novel. Rip-roaringly funny. Wise and wise-assed. It’s about addiction and love, self-pity and rage and moving instants of profound redemption. Akbar stands among our greatest poets, but calling this novel lyrical isn’t code for lack of plot. Akbar is a black-belt storyteller, and Martyr! is a page-turner I couldn’t put down." —Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club
“I disappeared into Martyr!—utterly consumed by it—and then it returned me to the world with wider eyes, a swollen heart, and sharpened nerve endings. This is a book that understands the strangeness and grief and ecstasy of being alive; that understands the strange envelope of a body, the proximate sublime on the bare chest of a beloved; the baffled wonderment of sobriety, the grief that spans every scale of the human project—and, more than anything, the impossible salvation of love persisting not despite but through these materials. Kaveh Akbar writes with the staggering entirety of his mind and heart, and Martyr! will stay in my soul for good—a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight—its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA for good." —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Poet Akbar (Pilgrim Bell, 2021) is an almost deliriously adept first-time novelist, writing from different points of view and darting back and forth in time and into Cyrus’ satirical dreams and the lives of Iranian poets from Rumi to Farrokhzad. Akbar creates scenes of psychedelic opulence and mystery, emotional precision, edgy hilarity, and heart-ringing poignancy as his characters endure war, grief, addiction, and sacrifice, and find refuge in art and love. Bedazzling and profound." —Booklist (starred review)
★ 01/26/2024
Following two exceptional poetry collections (Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell) Akbar's debut novel arrives with plenty of expectation. Yet even within the celebrated history of poets undertaking prose fiction, this title stands out as a work of uncommon artistic assuredness and vibrancy. The sense of life that permeates the novel's pages is perhaps ironic, given the material concerns Cyrus, a young Iranian American poet in recovery who is consumed by a desire for death, if only he could find surety that his life has contributed value to the calculus of the shared cosmos. But Akbar's debut is more than mere existential ponderance or addiction saga or tale of arrested development short-circuited by personal calamity—it's a work that understands, and poignantly, painfully, details how all such narrative threads can only ever be part of the larger story of, what Akbar calls, the "now-ness" of living. As carried through by his poetic pen and perspective, the novel is also rich in humor, sharp observation, and a plea for self-love, and all bleakness balanced by a tenderness that generously insinuates itself like sun through shut blinds. VERDICT Akbar delivers a delirious but moving portrait of one man's personal reckoning, the novel's profound affection for life fully earning its title's bold exclamation.—Luke Gorham
Iranian American actor Arian Moayed gives the performance of a lifetime in poet Kaveh Akbar's extraordinary debut novel. Cyrus Shams is a queer Iranian American poet in recovery who is grieving the long-ago death of his mother (killed when the U.S. Navy shot down a civilian Iranian plane) and struggling to find meaning in life. He becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrdom and decides to write a book about it. Moayed captures the earnestness that makes this novel shine: He's dramatic, ebullient, and wildly expressive. His voice is so emotional that it's almost hard to listen to at times--Cyrus feels so deeply, and Moayed speaks every word of that intensity aloud. Playful, funny, tender, and wise, this is a no-holds-barred celebration of life. L.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine