 | |
| Author | Kaveh Akbar |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Linda Huang |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction, family life |
| Publisher | Knopf Publishing Group |
Publication date | January 23, 2024 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 352 |
| ISBN | 978-0593537619 |
Martyr! is the 2024 debut novel by Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar. A New York Times bestseller [1] and one of the paper's Best Books of the Year So Far, [2] it was a finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. [3]
Akbar found critical acclaim with his poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf , released in 2017, and Pilgrim Bell , in 2021. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he made the decision to write a novel. [4] Akbar wrote poems that served as a step in drafting the novel, [5] and for a period he read two novels a week and watched a film daily as inspiration for his work. [4]
Martyr! was published by Knopf on January 23, 2024, and was critically acclaimed. [6] The New Yorker applauded it: "Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself." [7] The Boston Globe wrote that it is "Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor." [8]
Writing in The New York Times Book Review , Junot Diaz called it "incandescent" and its main character Cyrus Shams "an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic." [9]
At The New York Review of Books , Francine Prose noted: [10]
There’s something immensely appealing about a meticulously written novel whose characters (Cyrus isn’t the only one) are busily searching for meaning. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which an obsession with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the ethical is neither a joke nor an occasion for a sermon. And it’s cheering to see a first-time (or anytime) novelist go for the heavy stuff—family, death, love, addiction, art, history, poetry, redemption, sex, friendship, US-Iranian relations, God—and manage to make it engrossing, imaginative, and funny.
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Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet, novelist, and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell and of the novel Martyr!, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
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