Cyrus Shams is lost.
The orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, Cyrus never knew his mother. Killed when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident, Cyrus has spent his life grappling with the meaningless nature of his mother’s death. Now he is set to learn the truth of her life.
When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of his past: an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.
As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Author Biography: Kaveh Akbar has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes for his poetry, and his collection Pilgrim Bell (2022) has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. He has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, among others. Born in Tehran, he lives in Iowa.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Imprint: Picador
Publication date: 30/04/2024
Martyr!
By Kaveh Akbar
Review by Josh
Martyr! is centred around the life of Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American in active recovery from addiction who can't stop thinking about death and the divine. For those familiar with Akbar's poetry, these subjects are ones he's written about a lot, but with this debut novel he continues to find new angles and approaches to these topics. Kaveh writes with such beauty and curiosity, even when covering heavy subjects.
Cyrus is such a lovable and engaging character, even in the throes of his addiction and subsequent recovery, his view of the world and all it contains is a delight for the reader. The narrative moves its way around Cyrus's life through chapters told from both his mother’s and father’s perspectives, which works well to contextualise and further explain Cyrus and his actions. Akbar is a masterful poet and Martyr! shows he's also an exceptional prose writer.
For fans of his poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
You can listen to Josh's review from RDU below:
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