By Meg Zukin November 13, 2024 8:25 AM EST I n Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, Cyrus Shams is sleepwalking through life. He’s a poet, newly sober, obsessed with death, and deeply depressed. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother boarded a plane in Tehran to visit her brother in Dubai. A U.S. missile mistakenly shot it down, and she was gone. His father, suddenly a widower and single parent, moved himself and his young son to the American Midwest. While his father headed