Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, Martyr! would likely not have made it onto my tbr list if it weren’t for my #bookclubof3. Last year my friends Luke (former student and voracious reader) and Lauren (his wife and voracious reader) and I discussed John Williams’ novel Stoner and when they made plans to come home for a visit this summer we decided to talk about Martyr!. So, I have them to thank for this reading experience, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything was a do-over.

A recovering alcoholic (and aspiring writer), Cyrus Shams is crushed by the debilitating knowledge that he is not making anything of his life. Cyrus “told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even.”

Life hasn’t been easy for Cyrus. Born in Iran, his father Ali immigrated to the US after his wife, Roya, was killed when the U.S. Navy mistook the passenger jet she was on for something else and shot it out of the sky. (True event.) It was 1988, at the tail end of the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Cyrus was only an infant and has no memory of his mother.

Although Cyrus is essentially an American kid, he carries with him the trauma of his mother’s death and the stories his father has told him about Iran. After his father dies, Cyrus starts to consider – well, all the things you start to think about at a certain point in your life: your mortality and your purpose on earth chief among them.

Cyrus decides he wants to write a book about martyrs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, a martyr is “a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs and is often admired because of it.” I don’t think Cyrus has a particular religious belief he wants to die for. I think, in fact, this second definition is more appropriate: “someone who tries to get sympathy from others when he or she has a problem or too much work, usually when that person caused the problem or chose to do the work himself or herself.”

Like many 20-somethings, Cyrus is a bit of a navel-gazer. He admits that he wants his “little life to have something of scale. For the stakes to matter. […] For [his] having lived to matter.” To be fair, I think most humans would probably like that to be true, right? But it sucks Cyrus down a deep dark well as he searches for something meaningful in his life.

Then he stumbles on Marina Abramović-esque performance artist Orkideh, an Iran-born NYC-based woman who is spending her final days living (she’s dying of cancer) at the Brooklyn Museum where she will talk to anyone about anything. No appointment necessary. Who could possible know more about Cyrus’ quandary than her?

Luke, Lauren and I all agreed that Martyr! was a great read. Luke said he originally thought it might even be a five-star read for him, but as he gained a little distance from the book, he thought it was probably more of a four star read. That’s probably where I would land, too. I agreed with Lauren that the book had perhaps too many ideas to land all of them successfully. At least one of the reveals felt a bit contrived to me. There wasn’t a sucker punch of an ending which is something I look for in a five star read.

I wondered how Luke and Lauren might feel about Cyrus as they are far closer to his age than I am. Although some of the time his angst felt a bit circular, I still found him relatively sympathetic. I didn’t want to shake him at any rate.

Minor complaints aside, this is a beautifully written – and often original – book that asks (but doesn’t always answer) some of life’s big questions and tries to figure out exactly what it is to live a meaningful life.