Description
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 01/23/2024
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.25lbs
ISBN: 9780593537619
Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2023 pg. 5
Publishers Weekly 10/16/2023
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2023
"Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever." --Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of There There
"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 the Persian Gulf 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.
Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning--in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 01/23/2024
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.25lbs
ISBN: 9780593537619
Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2023 pg. 5
Publishers Weekly 10/16/2023
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2023