Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: a review
Wow. Just wow.
Martyr! is one of those books that leaves you speechless. That lingers in your mind for days. One of those books whose characters you find yourself missing once you've turned the last page.
And the fact that this is a debut novel? Genuinely mind-blowing. Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet and editor — and now, novelist. There's something almost unfair about a mind that works like his.
Right. Let me gather my thoughts and actually tell you what the book is about.
Martyr! in short
What is Martyr! about?
At its heart, Martyr! is about a young Iranian-American poet named Cyrus Shams, recovering from addiction, orphaned, and haunted by a question that refuses to leave him alone: what makes a life, and a death, meaningful?
His mother Roya died before he could know her, killed when a US warship shot down her civilian plane during the Iran-Iraq war. His father drank himself into oblivion on a chicken farm in Indiana. And Cyrus grows up carrying all of that: the grief, the silence, the inherited weight of a history he wasn't there for, and trying to write his way through it.
“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
About Kaveh Akbar’s writing style
Now, let's talk about how this book is written, because the craft here is just as remarkable as the story itself.
Kaveh Akbar is first and foremost a poet, and it shows on every single page. The language is precise without being cold, raw without being forced. It hits you in the gut and then moves on before you've had time to recover. The kind that makes you stop mid-paragraph and reread a line just to sit inside it a little longer.
On top of that, I found the overall structure to be really interesting. Alongside the main timeline, the novel weaves in flashbacks, multiple perspectives, excerpts from Cyrus's own draft of his Book of Martyrs, and dream sequences. It might sound chaotic on paper, but in practice, it feels like exactly the right way to tell this story: fragmented and layered, the way memory and grief actually work.
Then there's the POV choice, and this is something I noticed that I haven't seen many people talk about. Everyone except Cyrus speaks in first person. They own their voice, their story, their "I." Cyrus, the protagonist, the one desperately searching for meaning, is the only one written in third person. Kept at a slight remove, observed rather than inhabited.
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Seriously. If you haven't finished the book, please stop here. You deserve to experience it fully, without anyone taking that from you.
Still with me? Okay.
I'll admit I was genuinely surprised to find how differently people interpreted this ending. It seems like the vast majority of readers believe the story ends with Cyrus's death. But to me, everything in the novel points the other way.
Cyrus doesn't die at the end. He finally starts to live, and that, in the context of this book, is the bigger deal. Death has been his companion his entire life. His mother, his father, the drugs, the years spent slowly disappearing; his uncle is literally the angel of death. And Cyrus spends the whole novel dying, or at least thinking about it. The real shift, the one that actually means something, is choosing to stay.
I came across a Reddit thread by u/Rococo_Relleno that puts it brilliantly: death in Martyr! is almost aggressively mundane. Roya/Leila's plane goes down and we barely see it. Orkideh's death happens offstage. No fanfare, no transcendence. It's new beginnings that get the full cinematic treatment: the lightbulb flickering, Roya and Leila discovering each other, that final scene in the park. And I couldn't agree more!
The novel begins and ends with two prayers. The first: a plea for a sign to stop using. The second: a wish for relief from a world that has become unnavigable, because the world Cyrus has been living in, built on trauma and depression and writing as a coping mechanism that never quite worked, was never really his. As his conversation with Sang makes painfully clear, writing circled his hollow. It never filled it.
By the time he is sitting in the park, he has completely let go of the martyrdom project. He is once again at rock bottom, and therefore fully open to a miracle. That miracle is Zee. The moment he sees him, something clicks with startling clarity, and the whole world seems to respond: the floor heats up, hums, vibrates, the same way it once did for Roya when she found Leila. Seafoam, lavender blooming, horses running free. The book goes fully psychedelic. Nothing is mundane anymore. And when Cyrus finally speaks to Zee, really speaks to him, he feels lighter, like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. Not like someone leaving. Like someone who has just, for the first time, decided to stay.
What I loved about Martyr!
The writing, first and foremost. I was completely taken by it. There’s something lyrical about the prose without it ever feeling like it’s trying too hard to be beautiful, and I found myself stopping to reread lines simply because I liked the way they sounded.
And the ending.
It kept me on my toes in a way that felt genuinely earned. It literally felt like being levitated and pulled, all at once, straight into the pages.
I finished it and didn't move for a while. Just sat there thinking, wait, did that really just happen? Then, because apparently once wasn't enough, I went back and reread the final chapter. Partly because I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed any details, but mostly because I wanted to experience it again.
Should you read Martyr?
YES. Please do yourself this favor.
It's one of those books that reminds you why you read in the first place and that you whish you could read again for the first time. Kaveh Akbar has written something genuinely rare here, and I think it will stay with people for a long time.
Will you add Martyr! to your TBR?
If you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you thought. And especially what you made of that ending. And if Martyr! has been sitting on your TBR, I’d say this is your sign to pick it up. You won’t regret it!
