Martyr!

Critics Review

• I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life.

  John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

• Smart, dazzling, different… a novel of depth and complexity, tragedy and humour . . . This book is thrilling. There’s no other word for it. It’s like watching the novel itself be reinvented

  Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

• Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful.

  Lauren Groff, author of The Matrix

• In Cyrus, Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that Martyr! is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga . . . what Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.

  The New York Times

• Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care

  Raven Leilani, author of Luster

• An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years. Kaveh’s writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come . . . This book does everything.

  Tommy Orange, author of There, There

• It’s so, so incredible

  Kaia Gerber

• Martyr! will stay in my soul for good—a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight—its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA

  Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

• A brilliant debut… simultaneously funny and piercing… Akbar writes beautifully

  LA Times

• Akbar is a black-belt storyteller, and MARTYR! is a page-turner I couldn’t put down. Buy this book!

  Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club

• Akbar’s debut is full of love, fury, humour and wisdom. Protagonist Cyrus Shams… is coming straight for your heart

  People

• I laughed out loud

  NPR

• I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel like this. Martyr! is simply extraordinary. Kaveh Akbar has written a novel that will stay with me forever.

  Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

• Brilliant

  Los Angeles Times

• Reading Martyr! is a delight

  The Washington Post

• Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor … The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.

  The Boston Globe

• Deep-feeling, beautifully bruised … A darkly comic and heartrendingly earnest work

  The San Francisco Chronicle