Martyr!

The Instant New York Times Bestseller

by Kaveh Akbar

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Pub Date 7 Mar 2024 | Archive Date 8 Mar 2024

Pan Macmillan | Picador

General Fiction (Adult) | LGBTQIA | Literary Fiction

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Description

A most anticipated book of 2024 for Time, Nylon, Oprah, Marie Claire and CNN
One of Sarah Jessica Parker's Books of the Year

‘I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life’ - John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

'Smart, dazzling, different . . . This book is thrilling. It's like watching the novel itself be reinvented' - Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

'This book vibrates with love of life, beauty and language. I’m in awe...' - Natalie Portman

Cyrus Shams is lost.

Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life.

When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed. As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

* Martyr! was an instant New York Times bestseller w/c 27/1/24

Advance Praise

'I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life' John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

'Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful' Lauren Groff, author of The Matrix

'An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come . . . This book does everything.' Tommy Orange, author of There, There

'Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care' Raven Leilani, author of Luster

'Martyr! will stay in my soul for good―a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight―its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA' Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

'Akbar is a black-belt storyteller, and MARTYR! is a page-turner I couldn’t put down. Buy this book!' Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club

'I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever.' Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

'I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life' John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

'Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it...