Martyr!

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Akbar, Kaveh	4-week checkout	Due 02-15-2025
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Akbar, Kaveh	4-week checkout	Due 02-17-2025
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Akbar, Kaveh	4-week checkout	Due 12-09-2024
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Akbar, Kaveh	4-week checkout	Due 01-08-2025
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Akbar, Kaveh	4-week checkout	Due 02-05-2025

"This is a Borzoi book"
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
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.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Magnificent submitted by magg2185 on June 13, 2024, 1:30pm Beautiful prose. Kaveh Akbar is a gifted writer. Such a fantastic debut novel.

Incredible (INCREDIBLE!). OMG So GOOD! submitted by trender on August 17, 2024, 5:34pm Voice-y, funny, sincere, and bursting with life, Akbar’s protagonist Cyrus hungrily grapples with what it means to live a meaningful life and die a meaningful death. Akbar is totally unafraid to pick the padlocked shame spaces of the human condition: the bedwetting, the rote hum of addiction, the deep cringe of newfound sobriety, the thumb-sucking, the fever dreams—all that we have to lose and all that we have to gain. Instead of opening these spaces for the sake of spectating, judgement, or moralizing, Akbar invites readers into the spaces with compassion, humor, and connection. There is something in our darkest moments that brings us into the light in our own time, in our own way. This is such an ambitious, accomplished debut, told from multiple perspectives, shifting in tone as easily as dappled shadow, leaves in the breeze. The narrative is threaded through with poetry, hilarious dream conversations with famous people like Lisa Simpson and Rumi, and news items from the 1988 shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by U.S. forces. The philosophical undercurrents would make Kurt Vonnegut proud; Akbar is writerly friends with Tommy Orange and his influence is here too in Akbar’s ever-present love for his characters. He wants the best for them—and the reader can’t help but feel this care extends to them as well.