Author: Kaveh Akbar 

Synopsis: 

‘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

Shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Prize for Fiction 2024, longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award, named a best book of 2024 by The New York Times, Amazon, CBS, TIME and Sarah Jessica Parker, and on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List 2024

‘Smart, dazzling, different . . . This book is thrilling.’
Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

‘An absolute jewel of a novel’
Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

‘A kaleidoscopic debut’
Guardian

Cyrus Shams has always been lost. He’s grown up tangled in the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter, and his mother, whose plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby. Now, newly sober and maybe in love, he’s headed for an encounter that will transform everything he thought he knew. Can a final revelation change the truth of Cyrus’s life?

Electrifying, funny, and all-consuming, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a masterpiece.

* Martyr! was an instant New York Times bestseller w/c 27/1/24