Plot
Cyrus is a queer poet living in Indiana, recovering from addiction to alcohol and drugs. His father, now deceased, was an Iranian migrant worker on a farm in rural Indiana. Cyrus believes that when he was a baby, his mother was killed on Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger plane which was shot down by a US missile during the Iran-Iraq war.
Cyrus is interested in the idea of martyrdom, and begins working on a "book of martyrs", while considering his own conceptual suicide as a potential martyr. He hears of an Iranian performance artist named Orkideh, who has terminal breast cancer, and is spending her last days in the Brooklyn Museum as part of a Marina Abramović-esque performance piece named "Death-Speak". Cyrus travels to New York to talk with Orkideh, bringing his roommate Zee. Zee has strong feelings for Cyrus, although their relationship is often fraught.
The book cycles between time periods and perspectives, including chapters told by Cyrus' mother, who was in a secret lesbian relationship in Iran, and his uncle, who, while serving in the Iran-Iraq war, was instructed to dress as an "angel" on horseback in order to comfort dying Iranian soldiers on the battlefield.
Upon Orkideh's death, Cyrus finds out from Sang - Orkideh's gallerist and ex-wife - that Orkideh was actually his mother, Roya. Roya had swapped passports with her lover Leila in order to escape Iran, and Leila was killed on the plane. In a dreamlike final scene, Cyrus appears to reconcile with Zee, before walking into a pool of golden light.
Reception
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 Díaz 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.
Sarah Cypher of The Washington Post praised the reading experience as "a delight" and called the novel "wonderfully strange". [11]
In September 2024 Martyr! was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. [12] In October 2024, the novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. [13] [14]
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