A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK - 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.
"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.