Engaging and wildly entertaining, Martyr! will undoubtedly be considered one of the best debut novels of the year because it focuses on very specific stories while discussing universal feelings. It celebrates language while delving deep into human darkness. It entertains while jumping around in time and space and between the real and the surreal like a fever dream. It brilliantly explores addiction, grief, guilt, sexuality, racism, martyrdom, biculturalism, the compulsion to create something that matters, and our endless quest for purpose in a world that can often be cruel and uncaring. Akbar was already known as a great poet, but now he must also be called a great, fearless novelist.

DNF at 10%.

This was not for me. I kept waiting for it to be funny but it just left me feeling sad. TLDR, I have trouble reading books about alcoholics sometimes, especially if the MC is a man. Too much trauma for me to personally deal with.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

Reviewed for Library Journal:

"Following two exceptional poetry collections (Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell) Akbar’s debut novel arrives with plenty of expectation. Yet even within the celebrated history of poets undertaking prose fiction, this title stands out as a work of uncommon artistic assuredness and vibrancy. The sense of life that permeates the novel’s pages is perhaps ironic, given the material concerns Cyrus, a young Iranian American poet in recovery who is consumed by a desire for death, if only he could find surety that his life has contributed value to the calculus of the shared cosmos. But Akbar’s debut is more than mere existential ponderance or addiction saga or tale of arrested development short-circuited by personal calamity—it’s a work that understands, and poignantly, painfully, details how all such narrative threads can only ever be part of the larger story of, what Akbar calls, the “now-ness” of living. As carried through by his poetic pen and perspective, the novel is also rich in humor, sharp observation, and a plea for self-love, and all bleakness balanced by a tenderness that generously insinuates itself like sun through shut blinds.
VERDICT Akbar delivers a delirious but moving portrait of one man’s personal reckoning, the novel’s profound affection for life fully earning its title’s bold exclamation."

I don't understand all the hype and praise surrounding this book. The story and writing are pretty mediocre. I didn't find anything special about our main character. I found him insufferable and immature. Parts of this book were interesting and emotional but overall, I don't think this book is memorable.

Martyr! was a beautiful poetic novel about the main character's struggle with his inner demons. I appreciated the honest look at drug abuse.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is an inventive, exceptional novel that will absolutely be one of my favorite books of the year. Shifts through time and character perspective add layers and depth to this story that you will not predict, including a banger of an ending. As someone who doesn't typically re-read books, I wanted to restart this one almost immediately after finishing it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is such an interesting portrayal of grief, addiction, identity, art, and more. It took me a while to get into but once I did I was so invested. And the ending was fascinating! Would recommend if you enjoy litfic.

Martyr is an interesting mediation on just that -- what it means to die for a cause and how to pick a cause if you're lost. It's a somewhat backwards approach, but it certainly works as we follow Cyrus through dealing with his lost mother, distant father struggling to make a life for them, and collection of friends. He eventually finds himself at a fascinating performance art piece visiting a dying woman in a gallery to try to get some purpose.

i loved this book! i always love when poets write novels, and i think the way this book is experimentally structured pulled me through. it really picked up in the second half.

This is such a lovely novel. Cyrus is many things: queer, first gen, a recent college, a poet, and newly sober. Though Cyrus has some good friends, he is lonely and bereft of family. His life experiences have left with an obsession with martyrdom and a desire for a meaningful death. These questions fuel the novel.

The writing is good and it's easy to be swept into Cyrus' world. But, the book fuses many POVs and as the novel progressed, I felt as if we could have culled some of these perspectives and instead spent more time on Cyrus.

There is no doubt that I missed something with this book, but the ending was CONFUSING. I'm still not sure what happened there...

I requested Martyr as background reading for a review we ran on BookBrowse. Sadly, as yet, I have not had time to read it, but our reviewer gave it 4-stars and we featured it as one of four "top picks" of the week:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/ref/bp303360/martyr#reviews

"Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar is an interesting, dark, and unexpected novel. A life following major trauma leaves the main character lost and vulnerable. Unexpected draws and conclusion in this novel, as well as topics including art, depression, and addiction, was melancholy yet unique. Thank you NetGalley, the author and publisher for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

I think Akbar has a lot of talent and there were some lines that blew me away. I liked the discussion of martyrdom and what it means to build a life. However, I did not like the twist in this at all. It was so obvious that I thought it couldn't possibly be that. That choice made it feel a little cheap.

I found out about this book through word of mouth. People started sharing how big of a masterpiece it was and I eventually became interested and requested it. It's my first Kaveh work. The book is a book, not A Book, which I wanted it to be, A Book, I mean. The book has fantastic moments yet as a whole, I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I still recommend it because it's good, but not amazing as I wanted it to be. Many people have loved it, though, and that's lovely. Congrats to Kaveh on his debut novel!

Cyrus Shams is newly sober, sometimes suicidal, fascinated by martyrs and death and the cultures which honor them though for varying reasons. He's obsessed with his plan to write a book of poems celebrating them. His mother was killed in a plane crash when he was 5, her plane senselessly shot down by the US military, the country which Cyrus now calls home. His father left Iran and immigrated with Cyrus, only to live out the rest of his life working long hours at a Midwestern chicken farm before dying when Cyrus was in college. Cyrus is now a sometime poet, addict, drunk, determined to solve existential questions of loneliness, abandonment, and belonging, in the company of the family of sorts he has cobbled together out of other former addicts and misfits, including the young man he lives with who is his best friend and occasional partner.
He's exploring the life of his uncle, who as an Iranian soldier was forced to play a role of the "angel of death," riding a horse around a battlefield at dusk to comfort the dying. When he hears of a terminally ill Iranian painter living out her final days and hours holding court in a Brooklyn art gallery, he's fascinated--what can she teach him about death? Plus one of her paintings depicts a similar scene to that described by his uncle. He goes to visit her. The two connect in a deep mysterious way, and while he does get some answers, he also gets more questions.
Martyr! is an unusual book. It starts really slow and it ends very oddly, but it's worth the read. The poems that Cyrus is writing are gorgeous, and his musings on life, death, the meanings and connections we make or miss, are raw and honest and often amusing. I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it!

This book is just everything to me! It’s brimming with complex characters, moving themes, and finally a relatable self-destructive queer character. I instantly made it my book club’s next pick.

The main character’s antics and the author’s writing style are features you will likely either love or hate. For me, the tale of Cyrus and his storytelling style were off-putting, hard to relate to. While the fiction is meant to be humorous, satirical, it just didn’t hook me.

Whewwww, now this is a BOOK. I didn't know what to expect when diving into poet Kaveh Akbar's first novel MARTYR! but it was a delightful, meaningful, and wild ride.

Cyrus is a recovering alcoholic, a lost poet who is trying to find inspiration for this art despite his meaningless job, and looking back on his life as an Iranian-American. He lost his mother as a baby when her plane was shot down by America on the way to Dubai, and his father brought him to America shortly after to start a new life. With his father now dead as well, he begins a meditation on his upbringing, and his losses, by travelling to New York to see an Abramović-esque performance by another Iranian artist at the Brooklyn Museum.

Told in different POVs, but with Cyrus as our center of gravity, Akbar does an incredible job building characters and stories that make this book very hard to put down. The twist at the end was shocking and fantastic, and the ending of the book fantastical and surreal. I put it down a few days ago and it has still stayed with me. It is a book that I think would greatly benefit from a re-read, something I rarely do but have a feeling I may revisit this one - that's honestly the best kind of review I can give!

Not for me. This reads like a fever dream. I don't care enough about the underlying story to deal with the way the story is being told. Thanks for the advance copy from Net Galley.