Martyr! is one the best books I’ve read in a long time. Many books written in the last fifty years or so, even the good ones, are marred by facile character “development,” by frankly bad writing, or by chronological snobbery, rising to a sense that the author thinks, at least on some level, that the present moment towers above all past moments, and we have nowhere to go but up. Martyr!, on the other hand, is one of those books that transcends its present moment, that touches something of the common humanity that allows us lonely human individuals to see that despite the distances that lie between us, it is possible not to be alone. It’s not a perfect book, but if it were perfect, it would be less fully human than it is. Its excellence is of the kind that matters.

Kaveh Akbar signed my copy for me before I read it, and he also wrote, “May you walk in wonder.” It seemed an odd juxtaposition with the violently yellow cover and the title: Martyr! with an exclamation point. Still, we ought to walk through this world in wonder, even if very few of us succeed at doing so for any sustained period. Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that if you will but wait quietly, “Not only does something come… but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave.” Yet I often find myself too mired in sheer everydayness to find that quiet place to wait, too stuck in Eliot’s “twittering world” to find the darkness. Despite our nearly obverse externals, I have this distractedness in common with the protagonist of Martyr!, Cyrus Shams. We also share a belief in a God who sometimes feels unutterably far away.

Martyr! begins with a spark. We meet Cyrus lying on a mattress on the floor, somewhere between stoned and sober, in a room “that smelled like piss and Febreze.” And there, for a moment, a heartbeat, God reveals himself to Cyrus. And then the moment passes. On the next page, we start with Chapter One, two years later, with the now-sober Cyrus on his way to work, where he plays the part of a dying person (or, as Cyrus likes to think of it, one “of those who will perish”) so medical students can practice giving out bad news. His roommate, the Polish-Egyptian Zee, is concerned this morbid job isn’t good for Cyrus. Zee is probably right.

As the novel unfolds, we learn more about Cyrus and his life. The first few chapters reveal that he is the son of an Iranian immigrant, now deceased, named Ali, and a mother he has never known. Roya Shams was on her way to visit her brother in Dubai when her Iranian commercial flight was inadvertently or accidentally or maybe sort of on purpose shot down by an American aircraft carrier, killing all aboard. “Just shot out of the sky. Like a goose,” Ali reflects in a flashback.

We also learn that Cyrus is a poet, a pretty good one, and that he thinks a lot about dying. His father died while he was a sophomore in college, and he doesn’t know his family back in Iran. He is alone in the world (specifically Indiana), and he carries within himself an eternal, unshakable sense of dread. Where alcohol had occasionally given him the clarity to see “life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you,” he’s now sober but floundering, struggling to feel anything good, or to feel anything at all. He’s angry and suffering and confused. Still, Cyrus holds onto the idea that he wants his life—and his death—to be significant, not just “a rounding error” like his mother’s senseless murder. He decides to write about martyrs: people, as he defines it, who have found a way to make their deaths matter.