| Martyr! | |
| Author: | Kaveh Akbar |
| Cover Artist: | Linda Huang |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Literary fiction, family life |
| Publisher: | Knopf Publishing Group |
| Pub Date: | January 23, 2024 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Isbn: | 978-0593537619 |
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]
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.[4] Akbar wrote poems that served as a step in drafting the novel,[5] and for a period he read two novels a week and watched a film daily as inspiration for his work.[4]
Martyr! was published by Knopf on January 23, 2024, and was critically acclaimed.[6] The New Yorker applauded it: "Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself."[7] The Boston Globe wrote that it is "Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor."[8]
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."[9]
At The New York Review of Books, Francine Prose noted:[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.