Martyr! is the 2024 debut novel by Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar. A New York Times bestseller[1] and one of the paper's Best Books of the Year So Far,[2] it was a finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.[3] The novel follows Cyrus, a queer Iranian American dealing with depression and addiction and unable to cope with the death of his parents.[4]
Writing and development
Akbar found critical acclaim with his poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf, released in 2017, and Pilgrim Bell, in 2021. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he made the decision to write a novel.[5] Akbar wrote poems that served as a step in drafting the novel,[6] and for a period he read two novels a week and watched a film daily as inspiration for his work.[5]
Reception
Martyr! was published by Knopf on January 23, 2024, and was critically acclaimed.[7]The New Yorker applauded it: "Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself."[8]The Boston Globe wrote that it is "Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor."[9]
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Junot Diaz called it "incandescent" and its main character Cyrus Shams "an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic."[10]
There’s something immensely appealing about a meticulously written novel whose characters (Cyrus isn’t the only one) are busily searching for meaning. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which an obsession with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the ethical is neither a joke nor an occasion for a sermon. And it’s cheering to see a first-time (or anytime) novelist go for the heavy stuff—family, death, love, addiction, art, history, poetry, redemption, sex, friendship, US-Iranian relations, God—and manage to make it engrossing, imaginative, and funny.
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