Martyr!

‘I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life’ John Green, author of The Fault in Our StarsCyrus Shams is lost.Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life.When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of 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.'An absolute jewel of a novel. I haven’t loved a book this much in years’ Tommy Orange, author of There, There

I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life., Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. , An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come . . . This book does everything., Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care, Martyr! will stay in my soul for good—a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight—its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA

Kaveh Akbar has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes for his poetry, and his collection Pilgrim Bell (2022) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, on BBC Radio 4’s Start The Week and Front Row, on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour, and in The Kindergarten Teacher starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Born in Tehran, he lives in Iowa.