Martyr!: A novel

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.

"The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness." --Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies

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.