Identity through Grief

Due to the Memorial Day holiday, we will be meeting a week earlier in May - Monday, May 19. We will discuss our first selection from the theme "Yellow" (the cover is yellow!).

Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar (2024)
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.

Advance notice for our June meeting - we will be reading Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Askao Yuzuki.