I had no idea what to expect when I started this book. However, clever and beautiful writing, with a good plot and memorable characters made me enjoy it thoroughly.
Iranian American Cyrus is the protagonist, newly sober and trying to understand the significance of life through self discovery.

Kaveh Akbar is a fantastic poet, and "Martyr!" is his debut novel. He's skilled with words and writes beautifully. However, the novel, while having a lot of potential, sometimes feels a bit disjointed. While it began well, the progression of the story seemed hurried.

This novel follows the life of a an Iranian boy who moves to America with his father, after his mother dies, when a civilian aeroplane is shot down by the American military. The Story has told in a mixture of present day, sections and sections where the story is told from the point of view of the narrator’s mother .How can a son who loses his mother when he was a baby learn to know and love her?
The historical sections are set in the time of the Iran Iraq war in the 1990s
The image of a man or even a child, in a black robe on a horse riding through a battlefield after the battle, so the injured think I’ve seen an angel before they die, is both memorable and disturbing
The author has a skill in character development and his characters that appear in the story are real, and easy to relate to, and then empathise with
I quite liked the Dream scenes with his imaginary brother. I thought I might find irritating as quite often people telling their dreams is rather irritating thing, but these were quite beautiful.
The author has a witty intelligence style of writing, and is a great storyteller
I do normally like poetry and I understand that they has published poetry before. However,I found the inserted poems in this book , a little bit inaccessible to me and they didn’t add much to the story itself.
I did predict the plot twist, which I won’t divulge here in order to prevent the spoilers and found it rather lovely.
I read a early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book is published in the UK on the 7th of March 2024 by Pan McMillan Picador.
This review will appear on NetGalley, UK Goodreads and my book blog, bionicSarahsbooks.wordpress.com
After publication, the review will also appear on Amazon, UK

I feel like I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to? There were some things I really enjoyed, it was well written and I enjoyed the explorations of addiction, depression, creativity, and nationality. There were some really lovely segments of prose that spoke to me.

It's hard for me to pinpoint what exactly I didn't get on with. At times this felt like a book comprised of interesting ideas and turns of phrases with a story built around it rather than a strong story embellished by beautiful prose. Some of it felt sort of 'Tumblr Deep' such as the explanation of 'Sonder' and even the segmet about the complaint tablet to Ea-nasir, but maybe that's just a me problem.

I think I also struggled to connect with Cyrus himself. The story I enjoyed the most was of Cyrus's mother, I wish we had gotten to see more of her perspective, I could even read a whole book of her story.

Ultimately I didn't think this was a bad book by any means and there were bits I really enjoyed. I can see someone else really enjoying this, but it wasn't quite there for me.

Published 7 March 2024. This is a novel that grew on me, I preferred the second half to the first half, I was moved more by the second half than the first half. Our main character, Cyrus, is an Iranian American poet. He is a recovering addict who is now toying with the idea of suicide. He lost his mother when he was very young when her plane was bombed out of the sky by the US Navy. His grieving father moved them to a small town in Indians where he spent the rest of his life working on a chicken farm, hanging on it seems until Cyrus left for university - a feeling of that now he had brought the child to adulthood he could now die. Therefore Cyrus had all of this grief inside him and so dosed himself up with drugs and alcohol to dull the pain. As I said he is now toying with the idea of suicide but he wants his life and death to have meaning and so he contemplates writing a book about martyrs, about exploring the deaths of those overlooked. For instance, his own mother whose death was classified as an accident along with the other passengers on the plane - is she a martyr, and he considers others as well. Then he hears about an Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who is dying of cancer and has decided to make her death an art installation. She will die in a museum, but in her dying days people can visit her and talk about death. He decides to go to see her. This is the part of the book that I took the most from, the visits that Cyrus made to Orkideh, their conversations. The first half seemed to be full of multiple POVs, extracts from Cyrus' book of martyrs, dreams even and this non-linear structure made it difficult for me to have any real empathy for Cyrus - until the second half of the book. Once Cyrus was in conversation with Orkideh, then I began to connect with the 'man'. The second half of this is worth waiting for.

ok so. wow.

an incredible debut; i am so excited to read more from this author. this whole thing was just so poignant and gut wrenching and at times hilarious and at others completely soul shattering. if you like a plot heavy book you might not like this but i would honestly recommend it either way because it was written so beautifully.

i don’t think these characters will ever truly leave me; they felt so real and full and i was incredibly invested in even the background characters who didn’t appear on the pages as much.

an amazing first read of the year for me.

Mixed feelings about this book.
It’s certainly an impressive debut which is well crafted and explores so many important themes - grief, death, addiction, depression and race.

Cyrus is such a complex character and you really feel for him as he faces all his personal battles and trauma.

However, the structure didn’t quite work for me. I usually really like multiple point of views, but I really struggled to engage with the different perspectives and changes of format. Whilst very creative and clever, it disrupted the flow for me. However, I very much appreciate the inventiveness and I’m sure lots of people will adore those elements.

Poetic, emotional and creative. Lovers of intense literary fiction will definitely get a lot out of reading this.

It’s hard to say exactly why Martyr! disappointed me exactly. I went into this hoping that Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel would be a sure thing, but it turned out to be not quite that. There were elements I liked, of course, but on the whole it was not as much as I was hoping to.

The story follows a few different plotlines, namely Cyrus in the present day and his family in the past. All of it surrounds a single event, the death of Cyrus’s mother as her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf when Cyrus was a baby. The tragedy of it has chased Cyrus ever since, and it’s what drives him to visit an art exhibit, in which the artist is dying. Surrounding this all is Cyrus’s obsession with martyrs and his desire for martyrdom and to live a meaningful life.

Martyr! was definitely a well-written book, and poetic to boot. A lot of it was the kind of writing you can just sink into but, from time to time, it started to feel forced and a little irritating. This was surprising, since Akbar’s poetry is among my favourites, but his prose work occasionally felt a bit like the proselytising tone you see a lot on social media, in a gratingly earnest way.

Perhaps this wouldn’t have been such an issue if I didn’t feel entirely frustrated by Cyrus and his obsession with martyrdom. This is, as you might expect, a personal thing. And, while I say that this impacted my enjoyment of the writing, I’m wondering if it wasn’t some vicious circle type thing. The writing irritated me, so Cyrus’s obsession started to irritate me in that style, and it just started spiralling. I want to take a moment now to mention that, while I’m using these words, it was a low grade kind of irritation, one that had a little impact on my enjoyment but not a huge one.

Even so, Cyrus’s obsession was a large part of the book and was tied to his selfishness which, for most of the book, everyone simply accommodated. Yes, both of these aspects were, in part, related to his depression, and maybe it sounds harsh for me to say this but. For me, I needed someone to call him out on his self-martyrdom and selfishness well before he actually had to confront them. This, it seems, was the main driver for the book, which left a lot of it feeling directionless, since it happened so late. As such, I found myself much more interested by her mother’s POVs in the past (of which there were too few, comparatively).

Of course, if you’ve made it this far, there’s every chance that you will enjoy this much more than I did. Everyone’s tastes differ, after all. So, if this is a book that sounds good to you, I would stress that you try it!

Martyr starts well, with a couple of nice comedic scenes (or so I thought, did I misread them?). I was intrigued by Cyrus’s job as a medical actor and the interplay between him and a medical student, where he attempts to do her down and she turns the tables on him. Then there’s a lovely scene with his AA sponsor where he pulls apart his narcissism. I thought there was going to be more of this – sparky dialogue and tough love.

Instead it becomes Cyrus’s self-indulgent search for meaning in his life, interspersed with his declared intention to write poetry. I know that depression is like that – just at the point that you really need people, you become self-obsessed and push them away – but Cyrus is supposed to be nearly thirty. He comes across like an adolescent. It makes it hard to engage with his very real trauma.

Martyr doesn’t really feel like a novel but a series of notes and sketches for a novel (some of them are marked as extracts from a file Cyrus is keeping, but many aren’t, suggesting we’re not supposed to read them as such). And the end just felt too contrived for me.

This book follows Cyrus, an American-Iranian young man navigating life after losing both of his parents, battling addiction and becoming sober. It is so beautifully written - so much depth, emotional and prose. I really enjoyed the writing style with chapters dedicated to different perspectives as well as snippets of news articles and poems. A must read for literary fans!

Martyr! introduces us to Cyrus Shams, a recently sober son of Iranian immigrants (and evidently an autobiographical proxy for the author). As a child he moved to the US following the loss of his mother when her plane (Iran Air Flight 655; based on a real incident) was shot down over the Persian Gulf by US forces. His father, who made his way in the States as a factory farm worker, has also died, leaving Cyrus seeking meaning initially in narcotics but subsequently in poetry.

Cyrus becomes interested (or rather obsessed) with the concept of martyrdom, aiming to write a collection of poems celebrating famous martyrs. He's unsure whether to include his mother in the collection, wrestling with whether her loss had a purpose or not, and ponders his own desire for self-annihilation for a great cause - which he has yet to find.

His close friend and casual lover Zee alerts him to an interesting exhibition taking place in Brooklyn, in which a terminally ill female Iranian artist known as Orkideh is staging a Marina Abramovic-esque installation in which members of the public are invited to speak to her about subjects relating to death. Cyrus and Zee travel to New York, and Cyrus gets to know Orkideh, in the process upending everything he thought he knew.
Cyrus is the clearly the focus of the novel, and the bulk of the novel is told from his perspective. He's an engagingly self-destructive character, drifting through life without a sense of purpose but able to take some solace in friendship and poetry, as well as possessing a darkly humourous side. If he's not the most original creation in recent literature, he's definitely a very successful embodiment of a certain archetype. His attempts to connect with his Iranian heritage through poetry despite his very American upbringing bring both humour and sadness, and his complex but touching relationship with Zee adds depth.

Some of the (darkly) funniest sections in the book involve Cyrus' work outside his poetry. Towards the start of the novel, he's taken up a role in the training of doctors in which he has to portray characters being given bad news, often relating to terminal illness, which Cyrus manages to very starkly turn into being all about himself. Elsewhere his recounting of an odd job he and Zee took up in which they provide "domestic services" for a strange older man is a particular highlight.

Other sections of the book are told from the perspective of Cyrus' family members, including his father, his mother, and his uncle, who is haunted by his role in the Iran-Iraq war in which he dressed as the angel of death in order to comfort dying soldiers on the battlefield. These sections are generally good, but fall down a little because the characters' stories (with the possible exception of his mother's) are only developed insofar as they feed into Cyrus' central narrative.

Far more interesting, weird (in a good way) and sometimes amusing are the sections in which Cyrus recounts his dreams in which he manipulates famous (living, dead and even fictional characters) into having imaginary conversations. These are a rare exception to the general rule that hearing about other people's dreams is almost always supremely tedious. The section involving Lisa Simpson and those involving the barely disguised Trump stand-in "President Invective" are especially brilliant. They're indicative of a novel that both deals with reality and isn't afraid to diverge from it in the service of the creation of meaning outside of everyday "truth", a fact also expressed through its unusual and beautiful conclusion.


It's not a perfect book: its big reveal feels a little contrived (though possibly deliberately so) and it's uneven in places. Overall though, I thought it was an incredibly assured and exciting debut novel. I'm rarely a fan of poets writing novels, but this didn't feel like that at all. While it deals with the healing powers of poetry, and is punctuated by "Cyrus'" martyr poems between each section, its main thrust is classic prose, simple and effective and left mercifully undisturbed by poetic flourishes or unnecessary obfuscation. Its characters (especally Cyrus himself) are memorable and engaging and its story gripping and page-turning, and it was one of those books that I was excited to pick up every time, never quite knowing what to expect.

In summary: A really exciting debut, and a huge amount of fun to read despite its broad and deep subject matter. I hope it gets the attention it deserves on release next year. (9/10)

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar is an impressive debut novel. A quite challenging but definitely rewarding and thought-provoking read. The different perspectives are woven together seamlessly and make you want to keep on reading to see where it will go next.

Intellectually stimulating, if sometimes a little too long-winded, novel about the racist capitalist necropolitics of the American empire on the one hand, and the theocratic necropolitics of Iran on the other. In between, there's a queer artist struggling with addiction and finding meaning in his life and art. The novel and the reference to Marina Abramović also inspired my dreams. I dreamt that she was hammering some nails into my teeth. It wasn't a bad dream, although it sounds horrible. The nail that came out of the fourth bottom tooth on the right side was also sticking out of my mouth, and I was walking around with an artwork in my mouth.