THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 19, 2024): The latest issue features the excitement over advance copy reviews of a January novel, Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!” …“You’ve got to read this,” one editor said. “One of the most electric novels I’ve read in a long while,” another said. This kind of thing — everyone thrilled by the same book — is unusual at the TBR, and explains why “Martyr!,” about a grieving young man’s search for meaning, graces our cover this week.

A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life

In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.

Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewed by By Junot Díaz

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Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

• “Knife,” by Salman Rushdie
• “James,” by Percival Everett
• “The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link
• “Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar
• “The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson
• “The Hunter,” by Tana French
• “Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange
• “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez
• “Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison
• “Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver
• “Funny Story,” by Emily Henry
• “Table for Two,” by Amor Towles
• “Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley
• “One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford
• “The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul