Martyr!: A Novel by Kaveh Akbar

In Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, Cyrus Shams is drifting through life. He’s a poet, recently sober, fixated on death, and deeply depressed. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother was on a flight from Tehran to visit her brother in Dubai. A U.S. missile mistakenly brought the plane down, and she was gone. His father, suddenly widowed and a single parent, moved himself and his young son to the American Midwest. While his father worked on a poultry ranch, young Cyrus was haunted by nightmares, and nearly 30 years later, he’s still grappling with existential questions and overwhelming sadness. Forever shaken by the senselessness of his mother’s death, and reeling from the recent passing of his father, he decides he wants his own death to have meaning. He reads about an intriguing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, where an Iranian artist with terminal cancer is living out her final days on display, promising conversations to all visitors who come. So Cyrus travels from Indiana to New York City, determined to talk to the artist about his desire for a meaningful death. In Martyr!, Akbar delivers a poignant story of one man’s quest for connection and purpose in what can be a lonely world.

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