Behind the Scenes of Martyr! and Wandering Stars

We hope you are getting excited for our second annual On the Same Page event, featuring authors Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar! If you haven’t gotten your hands on the featured titles, Marytr!, opens a new window by Kaveh Akbar and Wandering Stars, opens a new window by Tommy Orange, many branches have copies on shelf right now. You can check your local branch or place a hold at kdl.org.

Let’s take a look behind the scenes at the inspiration for these books.

Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s first novel. For most of his life, he has been a poet. Akbar spent a lot of time reading and watching movies to understand narrative structure, reading two books a week and watching one movie a day before writing his book. 

Marytr! follows a young man named Cyrus who is struggling with the loss of his parents, addiction and suicidal ideation. Kaveh Akbar has said that the idea for the book started with the character Orkideh, an Iranian artist who, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, begins living in a museum and speaking to museum patrons until she passes away. In the novel, Cyrus is obsessed with having a meaningful death and is inspired by Orkideh’s end-of-life performance art. Before starting Martyr!, Akbar imagined a Marina Abramovic-esque performance like Orkideh’s. Initially, Akbar says this idea had no real story behind it, and so he developed a plot that he thought would make this idea interesting. Akbar has also said that he writes constantly and there wasn’t a definable moment when he began to write Martyr! — some phrases he uses were written 10-15 years ago!

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange’s second novel and a loose sequel to his debut, There There. Orange has said that Wandering Stars started as a more direct sequel to There There. During the writing process, he stumbled upon the history of boarding schools at a museum in Sweden which led him to a prison-castle in Florida, where he found that some of the prisoners there were members of the families from There There and from the same tribe as Tommy Orange. Once he discovered this connection, he decided to expand the sequel into a multigenerational saga.  

The title Wandering Stars came from a song Tommy Orange heard a few months before There There came out. There was already a lot of buzz around There There and so Orange was at a Penguin Random House warehouse signing books for the release, where a playlist based around the song "There There" by Radiohead was playing. "Wandering Stars" by Portishead came on and Tommy Orange immediately knew that would be the title of the sequel.  

We hope you enjoyed getting a sneak peek into the development of Martyr! and Wandering Stars. Find out more about the stories and authors at the big On the Same Page Author Visit on Wednesday, April 30, at Godwin Heights High School Auditorium. Free registration opens on March 17 at 9:00 AM.