Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar, an acclaimed poet, makes his fiction debut with the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American writer who is newly sober, grieving, and fixated on the idea of a meaningful death. His mother died when a U.S. missile downed her plane, his father worked himself out on a chicken farm, and Cyrus is trying to make sense of all of it through a book about martyrs. His search leads him to Orkideh, an Iranian artist with terminal cancer who is spending her last days on display in a Brooklyn museum. Moving across countries, generations, and even dreams, the novel wrestles with addiction, art, family, and what it means to make a life, or a death, matter.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Martyr!
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A newly sober Iranian American poet, obsessed with finding meaning in death, travels to New York to meet a dying artist staging her final days in a museum.
Yes. Martyr! is the debut novel of Kaveh Akbar, an award-winning poet, and his background shows in the book's language.
Yes. It was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times bestseller.
Martyr! was written by Kaveh Akbar, published in 2024 by Knopf.
Martyr! is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Martyr! takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Martyr! is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.