Martyr!

Martyr! is the 2024 debut novel by Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar. A New York Times bestseller and one of the paper's Best Books of the Year So Far, it was a finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.

Writing and development
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. Akbar wrote poems that served as a step in drafting the novel, and for a period he read two novels a week and watched a film daily as inspiration for his work.

Reception
Martyr! was published by Knopf on January 23, 2024, and was critically acclaimed. The New Yorker applauded it: "Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself." The Boston Globe wrote that it is "Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor."

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."

At The New York Review of Books, Francine Prose noted: "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."