In late 2008, as the world's economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario – not to be confused with Milton, Ontario – leaves his parents' basement in middle-of-nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless 20-something millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah – Leonard Cohen.

Hilariously ironic and irreverent, in Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray generates a quest novel for the 21st century — a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller — where a hero's greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime and sleeping in all day. (From Breakwater Books)

Morgan Murray is a writer from Alberta who now lives in Nova Scotia. Dirty Birds is his first novel.

Dirty Birds is on the Canada Reads 2021 longlist.