Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel “Martyr!” is a meditation on what it means to die for something—and what it means to keep living when you’re not sure why you should. It’s a book about addiction, heritage, faith, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of suffering. And while it doesn’t always land its punches with perfect precision, it asks questions worth sitting with.
The Weight of Inheritance
At the center of “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian-American poet adrift in Brooklyn, wrestling with addiction and the legacy of loss. His mother died when he was young—killed when the U.S. Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf. His father, a recovering alcoholic, has just died of cancer. Cyrus is left holding the pieces of a fractured inheritance: grief, displacement, and the Iranian tradition of martyrdom that he can’t quite access or understand.
Akbar doesn’t romanticize this inheritance. Instead, he shows how it sits uneasily on Cyrus’s shoulders—a weight he didn’t ask for but can’t put down. The novel asks: What do you do with a cultural legacy of sacrifice when you’re an American trying to figure out how to stay alive?
This question feels especially urgent for second-generation immigrants who exist in the space between worlds. Cyrus is too American to fully inhabit his mother’s Iran, too Iranian to feel entirely at home in America. The martyrdom that might have meant something to his ancestors feels like a ghost language he can barely speak.
Addiction as a Kind of Faith
The most compelling aspect of “Martyr!” is its treatment of addiction—not as a moral failing or a plot device, but as a kind of devotion. Cyrus’s alcoholism and drug use aren’t just about numbing pain; they’re about searching for transcendence, for meaning, for a way to feel connected to something larger than himself.
Akbar, himself a recovering addict and the son of an addict, writes about this with authority and tenderness. He understands that addiction often fills a spiritual void. When Cyrus drinks, he’s not just escaping—he’s reaching for something. The tragedy is that what he’s reaching for keeps slipping through his fingers.
The novel suggests that addiction and faith operate on similar circuitry: both are about surrender, about ritual, about believing in something beyond the self. Cyrus’s father found recovery through AA, which explicitly requires belief in a “higher power.” Cyrus, meanwhile, is stuck between his father’s faith in sobriety and his mother’s legacy of martyrdom, unable to fully commit to either.
What makes this treatment work is Akbar’s refusal to offer easy answers. Cyrus doesn’t get a tidy redemption arc. His recovery isn’t linear. His search for meaning doesn’t resolve into clean epiphany. Instead, the novel sits in the messy middle—the place where most of us actually live.
Family as Sacred and Profane
The family dynamics in “Martyr!” are rendered with a kind of brutal honesty. Cyrus’s relationship with his father is particularly well-drawn—full of love, resentment, misunderstanding, and the particular grief that comes from watching someone you love battle their own demons while you’re fighting yours.
Akbar captures something true about the children of addicts: the way they inherit not just genetic predisposition but also patterns of silence, shame, and survivorship. Cyrus’s father got sober, built a life, raised his son alone. But sobriety didn’t erase the past, and it didn’t prevent Cyrus from following a similar path.
There’s a moment in the book where Cyrus reflects on his father’s sponsor telling him, “Your father is a miracle.” And Cyrus thinks: “But what about me?” This is the heart of the family dynamic—the child who grew up in the shadow of their parent’s recovery, who knows they should be grateful but mostly just feels lost.
The novel also explores the absence of Cyrus’s mother—not as a void, but as a presence that shapes everything. She died a martyr in the most literal sense, though not by choice. Her death becomes mythologized, politicized, abstracted. Cyrus is left trying to know her through stories, through his father’s selective memories, through the fragments of a culture she carried with her from Iran.
This is where “Martyr!” is most tender: in its depiction of how we try to love people we barely remember, how we build relationships with ghosts.
Where It Stumbles
For all its strengths, “Martyr!” isn’t without flaws. The novel’s structure—jumping between Cyrus’s present, his childhood, his mother’s past, and various philosophical digressions—can feel disjointed. Some readers will find this fragmentation mirrors the disorientation of grief and addiction. Others will find it simply frustrating.
There’s also a thread involving Cyrus’s friendship with a terminally ill artist named Orkideh that feels somewhat contrived, as if Akbar needed a vehicle for Cyrus’s exploration of martyrdom and mortality but couldn’t quite make it feel organic to the story.
And at times, the novel’s intellectualism works against its emotional core. Akbar is a poet, and his prose is often stunning—full of striking images and philosophical insights. But occasionally, the book feels more interested in ideas about grief and addiction than in the lived experience of them. The thinking can overshadow the feeling.
Why It Matters
Despite these limitations, “Martyr!” succeeds as an exploration of inheritance, faith, and the search for meaning in a fractured world. Akbar asks: What do we owe the dead? What do we owe ourselves? How do we honor the past without being destroyed by it?
These questions matter for anyone carrying the weight of family trauma, cultural displacement, or addiction. They matter for second-generation immigrants navigating multiple identities. They matter for anyone who has ever wondered whether their pain serves a purpose or if they’re allowed to just let it go.
The novel suggests that maybe martyrdom isn’t about dying for a cause. Maybe it’s about the daily choice to keep living when living is hard. Maybe it’s about carrying your inheritance without letting it crush you. Maybe it’s about finding your own kind of faith—not the one you were handed, but the one you build from the wreckage.
Final Thoughts
“Martyr!” is an imperfect but deeply felt debut. It won’t work for everyone—its fragmented structure and philosophical bent may alienate some readers. But for those willing to sit with its questions, willing to follow Cyrus through his messy search for meaning, it offers something valuable: a portrait of what it looks like to inherit pain and still choose to stay alive.
Akbar doesn’t promise that the search will end in answers. But he suggests that the searching itself might be enough. And in a world that often demands tidy narratives of redemption and recovery, there’s something honest—maybe even hopeful—in that refusal.
This is a book about addiction and martyrdom, yes. But more than that, it’s about what comes after: the hard, unglamorous work of living.