Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR * 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.

"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.

Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) are his works. Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently teaches at Purdue University as well as Randolph College and Warren Wilson's low-residency MFA programs.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593537619
ISBN 10	0593537610
Title	Martyr!
Author	Kaveh Akbar
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	2024-01-23
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.