Dua Lipa has never treated her Service95 Book Club like a celebrity bookshelf designed for decorative purposes. Since launching it in 2023, her monthly selections have moved freely across countries and genres, with an obvious weakness for books that leave something slightly more complicated behind than a neat ending. September 2026 is no exception. Her latest pick is Martyr!, the debut novel by Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, a book whose title sounds forbiddingly solemn until you discover how funny, restless, and gloriously strange its pages can be. Published in 2024, the novel became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, confirming Akbar’s leap from acclaimed poet to one of contemporary fiction’s most compelling new voices.

What Is Martyr! About?

At its center is Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet newly sober and trying to understand what, exactly, makes a life matter. His mother died aboard Iran Air Flight 655, shot down by the U.S. Navy in 1988 when Cyrus was still an infant, and that inherited loss becomes inseparable from his growing fascination with martyrdom. His search eventually leads him to Orkideh, a terminally ill artist spending her final days as part of a performance at the Brooklyn Museum. From there, Akbar turns questions of death and sacrifice into something far less abstract: a story about the peculiar human need to make suffering mean something.

Why Dua Lipa Chose Martyr! For September

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, $ 10.66

It is easy to see why the novel fits the Dua Lipa Book Club universe. Martyr! moves between addiction, exile and art while refusing the respectful hush that often surrounds such subjects. Cyrus can be devastating on one page and genuinely funny on the next, an energy Lipa herself singled out when introducing the September selection. The accompanying Service95 podcast takes the conversation further, with Lipa and Akbar discussing his move from poetry into fiction, the real history woven through Cyrus’s story, and the ways art can give private grief a language. This is hardly a cozy September read to ease yourself back into routine. Then again, perhaps that is precisely the point. New season, new notebook, minor crisis about the meaning of existence. Dua’s book club is officially back in session.