Martyr!

Martyr! Is the 2024 debut novel by the Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, published by Knopf. It was a New York Times bestseller, one of that paper's best books of the year so far, and a finalist for the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.

Cyrus is a queer poet living in Indiana and recovering from addiction to alcohol and drugs. His father Ali, an Iranian migrant worker on a chicken farm in rural Indiana, has died, and Cyrus has grown up believing that his mother Roya was killed aboard Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian passenger aircraft shot down by a United States Navy missile during the closing stages of the Iran-Iraq war. He becomes preoccupied with martyrdom and starts assembling a book of martyrs while considering his own death as a possible act of it.

The plot turns on an encounter with a dying artist, which redirects Cyrus towards the scattered evidence of his family's history: an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death, and a haunting work of art by an exiled painter. The novel's structure is a search through clues rather than a chronological account.