Martyr!

Cyrus Shams is a queer Iranian-American poet in his twenties, newly sober, who has spent years thinking about death without ever finding a point to it. His mother, Roya, died as a passenger on Iran Air Flight 655, which a U.S. Navy warship shot down in 1988. His father, Ali, raised him in rural Indiana after the move from Iran, and labored until it killed him young.

Cyrus cannot get past how random his mother's death was, and his own history of addiction sits beside that grief. He becomes fixated on martyrs, people whose deaths served some purpose, and decides to write a book about them.

His roommate Zee tells him about Orkideh, a dying Iranian artist whose controversial performance piece is on show at the Brooklyn Museum. Cyrus makes the trip to New York to meet her. Their conversations drive the story, along with the voice of his uncle Arash and a run of dream visions and imagined meetings with poets and martyrs.

The book moves between rural Indiana and Brooklyn, and between past and present, as Cyrus nears a revelation about his mother and his family. It mixes autofiction, prose poetry and dark comedy, so the tone shifts between grief and humor, and the structure is loose and fragmentary. It was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.