Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American poet, recovering addict and professional drifter through other people’s institutions.

His mother was killed when the United States shot down Iran Air Flight 655; his father spent his life slaughtering chickens in the Midwest. Cyrus inherits these deaths as both private grief and historical debris, then becomes obsessed with martyrdom: who gets remembered, whose death acquires meaning, and whether a life can be made significant by the manner of its ending.

Akbar’s first novel moves between realism, dream, essay, hallucination and imagined conversations with figures including Lisa Simpson. The plot gradually gathers around a terminally ill Iranian artist staging her own death as a public artwork, but the novel’s real subject is the desperate human appetite for coherence. Faith, addiction, empire, poetry, sexuality and family history all become rival methods for making suffering legible.

The prose carries the pressure and velocity of Akbar’s poetry without sacrificing narrative pleasure. It is funny, formally restless and unexpectedly tender: a novel about death that keeps discovering reasons to remain among the living. For readers of Ocean Vuong, Tommy Orange, Elif Batuman and novels willing to let metaphysics enter the room without immediately calling security.

Knopf, 2024 first UK edition, first printing paperback. Light shelf wear and minor corner creasing; internally clean.