Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search 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 Tehran 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.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

I’ll be honest—I avoided reading Martyr! for a while. You know when a book gets so much buzz that you start to get suspicious? Like, there’s no way it can live up to the hype, right? That was me with this one. But wow. I was so wrong. This book wasn’t just good – it was different. Unexpected. And, in a lot of ways, exactly what I didn’t know I needed.

From the very first page, I was hooked. Cyrus Shams is the kind of character that feels like a punch to the gut but in the best way. He’s lost, angry, raw, and deeply vulnerable. There’s a sort of self-destructive poetry to him. He’s stumbling through life, newly sober, digging through the ashes of his past, and trying to make sense of who he is and why he keeps getting in his own way. He’s got that magnetic, chaotic energy that draws you in even when you know he’s about to make a mess. And oh boy, is he good at making a mess.

Cyrus is obsessed with martyrdom, not in the religious or traditional sense exactly, but in a broader, messier way. He’s fascinated by people who’ve suffered or sacrificed, people who lived with intensity, who meant something. And this obsession becomes the lens through which he tries to piece together his own history. This obsession may have something to do with stories of his mother’s brother who would dress as the angel of death and ride through Iranian battlefields to bring dying soldiers comfort. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that his mother was killed when Cyrus was just a baby when her plane was bombed while the family still lived in Tehran.

One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, was the storyline surrounding Cyrus’ mother. It’s not the main thread, necessarily – it kind of runs beneath everything else – but it’s the one that quietly broke my heart. Though he never knew her, the ghost of her is a wound that shapes every part of Cyrus’ life, and the more he uncovers who she really was (or might have been), the more complicated and painful everything becomes. There’s a certain sad beauty in the way Akbar handles her story. It’s never overly sentimental, but it’s full of this quiet, devastating hope – like maybe even the most tragic stories can still offer something tender.

Another thing that really struck me with this book was the prose. You can tell that Akbar is a poet. His language is sharp and lyrical, and the way he moves between the gritty reality of addiction and grief and the almost dreamlike moments of reflection or artistic transcendence is seamless. It’s immersive. You’re in it with Cyrus every step of the way.

And even though the novel is heavy, it also has some funny moments, not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way, but in that dry, sharply observed way that makes you smirk and shake your head because it’s too real. Akbar captures that absurdity of being alive, of trying to make meaning out of things that maybe don’t have any.

This is a novel that’s going to stick with me. It’s one of those books you finish and then immediately want to flip back to the first page because you know there are layers you missed, things you’ll see differently the second time around. It’s messy, soulful, and deeply human.

So yeah—if you’ve been putting this one off like I was, consider this your sign to pick it up. This is a deeply affecting, unflinchingly honest look at what it means to live with grief, to search for purpose, and to maybe, just maybe, find something close to peace in the process. It’s not an easy read, but it’s absolutely a worthwhile one.

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