Martyr! A Novel

This book had so much love, so much heart, that I don’t know if I can contain it all. Kaveh Akbar disappears into the book and leaves you with characters so real you’d swear they exist. It’s a heavy book—anyone battling with mental illness or addiction may find it too raw. That is a testament to its observation and immediacy. If you can, let Martyr! shake you.

Cyrus Shams is an unpublished poet, former alcoholic, and recovering drug addict pretending to have terminal illnesses to train doctors on their bedside manner. He's profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally, sad but comes off as a bit of an emo 20-something. As the story opens we find him lying on his mattress that smells like piss and Febreeze and dreaming of becoming a martyr.

Cyrus' mother was in a plane mistakenly shot out of the sky by the US Navy, his uncle dressed as the angel of death to comfort dying soldiers in the field and now wrestles with PTSD, and his father made it to the US to see Cyrus off to college before dying himself. In New York to see an artist installation by a woman named Orkideh who, dying of breast cancer, sits in the museum and answers questions, Cyrus is immediately pegged by her as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man.”

Throw in some dream interludes where Lisa Simpson chats with his mother and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes an appearance, one hell of a coincidence, and snippets of poetry and you've got a free-wheeling, debut novel with a poet's careful consideration of language that's still careening all over the place while riding a swelling wave of critical love. A messy, imperfect, but wonderfully ambitious outing.