English language
Published March 20, 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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.
It was good! There was a plot point early on that kind of fucked with my suspension of disbelief and bugged me like a splinter the whole rest of the read, and some neatness in the plot that I wasn't totally buying/in the mood for. But I'm a sucker for expert prose, subtly handled subject matter, and readability so it won me over.
