In Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, Cyrus Shams is sleepwalking through life. He’s a poet, newly sober, obsessed with death, and deeply depressed. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother boarded a plane in Tehran to visit her brother in Dubai. A U.S. missile mistakenly shot it down, and she was gone. His father, suddenly a widower and single parent, moved himself and his young son to the American Midwest. While his father headed to work on a poultry ranch, young Cyrus was plagued by night terrors, and nearly 30 years later, he’s still grappling with existential questions and overwhelming grief. Forever shaken by the senselessness of his mother’s death, and reeling from the recent passing of his father, he decides he wants his own death to matter. He reads about an intriguing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, where an Iranian artist with terminal cancer is living out her final days on display, promising conversations to all patrons who make the pilgrimage. So Cyrus travels from Indiana to New York City, determined to talk to the artist about his desire for a meaningful death. In Martyr!, Akbar delivers a wrenching story of one man’s quest for connection and purpose in what can be a lonely world.
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