Erie Reader Book Club: June 2026
Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar
SUNDAY, JUN. 28
The Erie Reader Book Club will be reading and discussing Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar in conjunction with the Pride issue of the Reader.
Each June, we look for a book that not only relates to the LGBTQIA+ community in some way but also celebrates the diversity that can be found within that community and tells a compelling story. In Martyr!, we see this kind of story through the main character Cyrus, whose complexities and struggles are the driving force within the novel.
Newly sober and newly orphaned, Cyrus Shams is a young, queer poet dealing with the violence and loss that has plagued his family from Iran to America. After his mother's plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf, his father's life in the U.S. was limited by his work at a factory farm in the Midwest.
After his father's death, Cyrus begins working on a "book of martyrs," a subject he finds great interest in, and contemplates the meaning of martyrdom. The search for a family secret leads to his learning of a terminally ill Iranian performance artist living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum and he embarks on a journey to meet her to better understand not only her final exhibition, but also his own place within his family's story.
What follows is a delightful, funny, original, and riveting tale of not only one man's journey to find meaning in his own life, but of the meaning we all try to find in our lives – through faith and art, through ourselves and through others.
1 p.m. // Werner Books and Coffee, 3608 Liberty St. // Free to join, cost of book not included // For more info: wernerbooks.com
