Martyr! A Novel

It unfurls until it's bigger than the men, then it keeps unfurling until it's bigger than the world.

A poet writes a novel and the prose is beautiful. I had never heard of Kaveh Akbar before this year and I was drawn to this book at first based on the physical object. The cover is arresting but it was also in a format I hadn't seen before: a European trade paperback. It's sort of equivalent to the hardback I'm used to. It comes out first, is pricier. It's just a bigger paperback. All of this to say, a larger than life book with a great cover, an unknown, and a title like Martyr!, always with exclamation mark. It got me.

It's a confident, swaggering book. Dream sequences, notoriously pointless and annoying, in Akbar's hands are touching and very funny. Humour runs throughout this pretty tragic story. He knows how to joke about US-Iranian relations, the search for God, and the search for his mother.

I can't really get it across to you how brilliant the prose is in this chaotic, swerving but beautiful book. Great books often feel like a magic trick by the end. All the scraps laid down for you suddenly come together and the author reveals a live dove that flies away. Martyr! certainly does that; the ending is a beautiful culmination. But what makes it special is you feel like Akbar could do this all day.