Martyr!

In 2015, Cyrus Shams, a twenty-seven-year-old Iranian American addict and aspiring poet, lies in his squalid apartment at Keady University in Indiana and begs God for a sign. The light bulb may or may not flicker. Cyrus, fueled by a daily cocktail of pills, weed, and Old Crow whiskey, is left to decide what the ambiguity means. That night, at an AA meeting, he confesses to his sponsor Gabe B. that recovery feels like nothing, that he wants to die, and that he wants his death to matter—he wants to be a martyr. Gabe mocks the romance of the idea; Cyrus storms out, vowing to quit AA, and the central desire of the novel is set.

The book then opens out into Cyrus's history. His mother Roya boarded Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988, leaving infant Cyrus behind because she thought him too young to fly; the USS Vincennes shot the plane down, killing all 290 aboard. His widowed father Ali, raging and unmoored, sold everything in Tehran and emigrated with Cyrus to a chicken breeder farm in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he worked dawn shifts, drank gin nightly, and raised a precocious, sleepless son largely from a distance. Ali, narrating his own life, frames existence as a numbing loop—work, eggs, basketball, gin—justified by an old hadith: God answers a starving man's prayer by giving him a baby to care for.

Cyrus's insomnia and night terrors give rise to an internal game: scripted dialogues with heroes and the dead—Lisa Simpson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Rumi, his invented little brother Beethoven Shams, and above all his mother. These dream-conversations recur throughout the book, debating meaning, art, sacrifice, and the will to live. In one, Orkideh leads President Invective through a mall where original masterpieces are paid for in body parts; in another, Ali confesses to Rumi that he believes Roya never desired him and may have been unfaithful, while Rumi predicts Cyrus will write a remarkable book.

At Keady, Cyrus drinks, uses, and dates Kathleen, a wealthy Republican whose money and racism he tolerates as moral foil. He meets Zbigniew "Zee" Novak, a Polish-Egyptian server at a hookah bar, who insists Cyrus is a poet; their drunken first night becomes the foundation of a deep friendship. Pre-sobriety, Cyrus and Zee earn money doing yardwork in their underwear-clad neighbor Jude's yard; high on homemade fentanyl, Cyrus chops his own foot with an axe, leaving a wound that never heals. Zee realizes, slowly, that he is in love with Cyrus. After Ali's sudden death, Cyrus's drinking deepens until an undramatic morning sends him into recovery; in his manuscript BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, he reframes sobriety not as abstinence but as the painful reconstruction of an entire self.

The novel's other great current runs through Roya's life. As a child in 1970s Tehran, she is shamed by apparent bedwetting, until she discovers her brother Arash has been urinating on her at night. Conscripted in 1984 as a "zero soldier" in the Iran-Iraq War, Arash is assigned a secret role: dressed in black robes on a black horse, his face lit by a hidden flashlight, he rides among dying soldiers as a vision of an angel, sustaining their faith so they don't take their own lives. The role haunts him for life and later inspires Roya's breakthrough painting.

Married to Ali and secretly pregnant with Cyrus, Roya is left for a week with Leila, the brash new wife of Ali's friend Gilgamesh, while the men go fishing. Leila smokes, removes her hijab, impersonates men in public, and pulls Roya into an alley where she kisses her. Their affair consumes Roya, opening her to a future she had never imagined. When Gilgamesh discovers them, the women plan Leila's escape: they swap passports, and Leila boards Flight 655 under Roya's name. The missile that the world believes killed Roya in fact killed Leila. Roya, holding Leila's documents, flees through Turkey to New York.

In New York, Roya grieves Leila bodily and Cyrus across time, takes a diner job, and paints obsessively. The Vietnamese gallerist Sang Linh recognizes her as an artist, demands a piece, and launches her career. Roya invents the name Orkideh—the name she and Ali had chosen for a daughter—refusing to attach Leila's name to her art. Her painting Dudusch, of Arash as a child-angel on a battlefield, anchors a sold-out solo show. Sang and Orkideh become lovers and lifelong partners; one cherished 1997 night, uninstalling a show with Sang's son Duy, Orkideh jokes about buying a Cadillac car door for the end of the world, and the three dance through the gallery in unbroken joy.

Decades later, terminally ill, Orkideh stages Death-Speak at the Brooklyn Museum, sitting with visitors as she dies. Drawing on Forough Farrokhzad, she rejects art as ornament and insists on stark presence: having missed her first death when Leila died in her place, she refuses to be absent from her real one. Sang, hurt that Orkideh hid her diagnosis, finally relents and names the piece. Cyrus, drawn by the project for his manuscript, travels to New York with Zee. He sits with Orkideh repeatedly, not knowing she has recognized him from the moment he stepped into the line.

After her death, Sang calls Cyrus and tells him Orkideh died on her own terms. Pressed, she confirms what Cyrus has suddenly suspected: Orkideh was Roya, his mother. Sitting on a Prospect Park bench, scrolling through images of Orkideh's face for traces of Roya and of himself, Cyrus reckons with the collapse of his life's foundational story—his mother did not die on Flight 655. The novel closes on the threshold of his confrontation with that inheritance: a meaning, finally, but not the martyrdom he had been begging for.