Martyr!

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar

#1597 of 8,085 books · #784 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction (2024) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2025).

Martyr! was a New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for the National Book Award, named one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year, and a Time Must-Read Book of the Year. 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. 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.