I found out about Martyr! while scrolling through people’s best books of the year lists at the end of the 2025 and, by coincidence, it was available at my local library. So why not grab it and start reading?
I went in with absolutely no expectations. I didn’t even realize at first that I had read something by Kaveh Akbar before. But just a few paragraphs into Martyr!, it was obvious this book was written by a poet. There’s a certain attentiveness to language and a rhythm to the sentences, that you can feel right away.
Coming from such a blank slate, this book surprised me in the best possible way. It’s easy to say that Martyr! is really good, but even if I had gone in with high expectations, I think it still would have charmed me.
The main storyline follows Cyrus, an aspiring writer who grows up to become an alcoholic and addict, and at the same time, a poet deeply obsessed with the idea of martyrdom. He keeps circling the same questions: can life and death ever truly hold meaning?
When Cyrus hears about an art exhibit in Brooklyn where a successful painter with terminal cancer has turned herself into her final work, he feels an immediate pull toward it. Newly sober and newly orphaned, he is drawn to this strange intersection of art, mortality, and purpose.
What made the novel especially compelling for me was the layered human experience woven throughout the story. Across its shifting narrative threads, the book explores addiction and sobriety, the quiet weight of grief, the restless curiosity of artists, and the complicated terrain of family and cultural identity.
Themes like martyrdom, apathy, belonging, and recovery surface naturally, never feeling forced or overexplained. Instead, they create an emotional rhythm that keeps changing, sometimes heavy, sometimes tender, sometimes unexpectedly funny. I never felt emotionally bored while reading this book. It kept asking new questions, and I found myself wanting to sit with them a little longer each time.
My Favorite Bits
- “There is no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little bit more.”
- “For me, the difference between heaven and hell is not giving a shit about the mess.”
- “Can you imagine having that kind of faith?” Cyrus asked. “To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not that certain of gravity.”
- “That certainty is what put worms in their brains, Cyrus. The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.”
- We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that.
- Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequences.
- Whenever I go, I carry the grace of having lived after I died. What did I do to deserve that? Nothing. That’s what makes it grace. (..) Grace to live at all—none of us did anything to deserve it. Being born. We spend our lives trying to figure out how to pay back the debt of being. And to whom we might pay it.
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Publication date: 23 January 2024
Number of pages: 331 pages
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