Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is the kind of debut novel that feels both entirely new and deeply lived-in. Akbar, best known for his poetry, brings that same sharp lyricism and emotional intensity to prose, creating a book that pulses with raw beauty. The story follows Cyrus Shams, a queer Iranian American wrestling with grief, addiction, and a sense of spiritual dislocation. His parents are gone, his sense of self is fractured, and he moves through the world with the weight of inherited trauma and a desperate hunger for meaning.
Akbar’s writing is dazzling, sometimes heartbreakingly precise, other times sprawling and chaotic in a way that mirrors Cyrus’s state of mind. He captures addiction not as a simple pathology but as something porous and consuming, tied to longing, loneliness, and the desire to dissolve into something greater. The novel is full of sharp, funny, and painful observations about faith, colonialism, queerness, and the absurdity of existence, but it never feels weighed down by its themes. There’s a lightness in Akbar’s touch even when the subject matter is heavy.
At times, Martyr! leans into surrealism with moments that blur reality and hallucination. Cyrus’s voice carries such an electric charge that it hardly matters whether what he’s seeing is real in a conventional sense. The novel’s structure is loose and episodic, sometimes looping back on itself, sometimes moving in unexpected directions, but it’s held together by its urgency. Cyrus is searching, for meaning, for God, for love, for escape, and Akbar makes that search feel visceral on every page.
Martyr! has already established itself as one of the most talked-about novels of the year, earning praise for its boldness and originality. Junot Díaz called it “incandescent,” and it was recently longlisted for the National Book Award. But more than its accolades, what makes this novel unforgettable is how deeply felt it is. It’s a book about longing in all its forms, about the need to be seen and the fear of being known, about faith and failure and the spaces in between. Akbar has written something luminous and shattering, a novel that refuses easy resolution but leaves an imprint that lasts.
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