Borrowed in Brooklyn

BPL · Book · 2024

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum"-- 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.

Demand pressureiDemand pressure: composite score across the 12 tracked branches — rewards low availability, branches all out, recent drops, and (when exposed) public hold counts. Higher = harder to get borough-wide.

778

Available

2/33

Branches all out

8/10

Public holdsiPublic holds: BPL exposes 'people waiting' at the bib (record) level — one number per work for the entire 60+ branch BPL system, NOT just the 12 tracked branches. We capture the number when it's there. 'Not exposed' means BPL didn't expose it on this scrape — we never substitute zero for missing data.

16

ISBN 9780593537619