Martyr!

Author: Kaveh Akbar

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2025/03/08

Pages: 352

This feels like a spiritual successor to Wise Blood in the best possible way. It’s a character study in a series of vignettes that waste no time getting under your skin. It treats religion, and religious trauma, with a sense of morbid curiosity.

Martyr! manages to tackle big concepts, like what it means to live and die as a human being, but it does so by examining seemingly mundane, workaday moments.

To wit, Kaveh Akbar describes the blue of a character’s eyes as “the kind of blue many blond people’s eyes are. So common you forget how pretty they are. Like pigeons.”

This was a gorgeous book. All the stars. I’d say I’d die for it but that’s a little on the nose.