
Martyr!
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Arian Moayed
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By:
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Kaveh Akbar
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.”—Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of There There
“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.”—Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
©2024 Kaveh Akbar (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Incandescent . . . Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that Martyr! is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga . . . Akbar is a dazzling writer, with bars like you wouldn't believe . . . What Akbar pulls off in Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A dazzling, thrilling debut novel about identity and loss . . . Martyr! thrillingly depicts why we cobble selves from alloys of words and cultures.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A brilliant and blisteringly alive novel about not just how we go on, but also why. Kaveh Akbar's first novel is so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe. I will carry this story, and the people in it, with me for the rest of my life."—John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
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Story
October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.
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Road to nowhere
- By Glenda O'Rourke on 07-29-24
By: Kevin Barry
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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Orbital
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sarah Naudi
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
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Dull
- By ELLEZEE on 02-03-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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James
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers/listeners of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
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This is the real story of Huck…
- By Poor Fisherman on 04-07-24
By: Percival Everett
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Last Summer in the City
- A Novel
- By: Gianfranco Calligarich, Howard Curtis - translator, Andre Aciman - foreword
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between run-down hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At 30, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich - but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever.
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must check out
- By Anonymous User on 09-28-22
By: Gianfranco Calligarich, and others
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Evenings and Weekends
- A Novel
- By: Oisín McKenna
- Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh-Young
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant, and broke.
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Amazing Narration
- By Kristen on 03-12-25
By: Oisín McKenna
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The Bee Sting
- A Novel
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, and others
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
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Bone Clocks meets Jonathan Franzen
- By Cranson on 10-26-23
By: Paul Murray
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My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird
- New Fiction by Afghan Women
- By: 18 Afghan Women
- Narrated by: Sitara Attaie
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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A woman's fortitude saves her village from disaster. A teenager explores their identity in a moment of quiet. A tormented girl tries to find love through a horrific act. A headmaster makes his way to work, treading the fine line between life and death. These and more original, vital, and unexpected stories hail from extraordinary voices rooted in Afghanistan's two main linguistic groups (Pashto and Dari), and were developed over two years through the writer development program Untold's Write Aghanistan Project.
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Absolutely outstanding
- By Charlie Woodside on 10-21-22
By: 18 Afghan Women
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Wandering Stars
- A Novel
- By: Tommy Orange
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, MacLeod Andrews, Alma Cuervo, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola.
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Beautiful writing and performance of realistic native family saga
- By ReallyNelie on 07-12-24
By: Tommy Orange
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Beautyland
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she's different: she possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings.
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Unforgettable
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-24
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Boulder
- By: Eva Baltasar
- Narrated by: Lucianna Mauren
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Abridged
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Boulder é uma rocha em alto-mar. O trabalho na cozinha de um navio mercante é ideal para ela, afeita à solidão, vagando de porto em porto. Quando conhece...
By: Eva Baltasar
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Our Evenings
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
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Sublime Collaboration
- By Phip Herrick on 11-20-24
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Colored Television
- A Novel
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped.
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Frustrating
- By Carolyn White on 12-12-24
By: Danzy Senna
One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
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We live until we die
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Best contemporary fiction read since Infinite Jest
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Searching for meaning and love
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confusing but compelling
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Beautiful
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Terrific, lyrical, beautiful writing
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Brilliant writing
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After reading it, I recommend a reader put it aside ( but not too far away) with the intention of reading it again perhaps a month later. Yes, it’s that good.
Worthy of being cited as best of 2024
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Best narrator!
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