Every fifty pages or so, I asked myself if I wanted to keep going. For most of its length, Martyr! is perched, maddeningly, just between intriguing and clumsy. The prose is sometimes elegant, sometimes stilted; the plot sometimes clever, sometimes contrived. Only in the final few chapters of the book does Akbar’s central question—what good can we make out of our pain?—finally hit (and it does hit hard). Maybe we as readers are meant to hover, like the main character Cyrus, in a slight daze throughout, navigating our way through addiction, recovery, geopolitics, sex, so that the final unfolding of a life’s purpose, or at least acceptance of what is, can be all that much sweeter. I can believe that. But a sustained daze might also leave you wanting relief more than revelation. A short story or a poem might have been a better choice. 7
Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! Knopf, 2024. Reviewed September 13, 2025.