Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

We're moving: Due to Meetup's rising costs, I'm moving our website host from Meetup to Bookclubs.com. The events will remain active on Meetup through the beginning of September to allow everyone plenty of time to transition.

Going forward, you can find our book club at [https://bookclubs.com/portland-literary-fiction-book-club/join/ ](https://bookclubs.com/portland-literary-fiction-book-club/join/)You will need to create an account, but signing up for and attending book clubs is free. An app is available for Apple and Android.

~352 pages

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.