“Canadians rejoice! Our Vonnegut has finally arrived! Morgan Murray’s debut is a great, brawling, sprawling, muscular glory of a story. Funny, dark, and wholly original.”

–WILL FERGUSON, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize

“Murray’s Dirty Birds is a brilliant, antic, absurd and cut-to-the-quick satire of millennial life. There’s a laugh and beautifully conjured insight on every page of this joyful extravaganza. A very, very funny and boldly imagined novel.”

–LISA MOORE, winner of Canada Reads

“There’s work and care in the writing; the experiences, however foolish, feel earned. At the same time it’s kinetic: the words, like birds, take flight.”

–JOAN SULLIVAN, The Telegram

“This book would make a great Canadian film starring Michael Cera. Refreshingly backlit with the nostalgia of Obama era planet Earth, riffing on a myriad of contemporary themes including intergenerational tensions and anxieties, global economic frailty and the pursuit of young desire, Dirty Birds is the perfect misfit read for your next layaway, or when you’re down to your last shot of whisky. It provides days’ worth of warm, weird feelings.”

–NATHANIEL G. MOORE, Atlantic Books Today

“The star of Dirty Birds, Milton Ontario, burgeoning poet, has travelled from the middle-of-nowhere Saskatchewan to the grime of Montreal in search of adventure and Leonard Cohen. And, unfortunately, adventure and Leonard Cohen are just what he finds. Milton is no anti-hero but the negative of hero, a man floundering through life when life’s got it in for him. Dirty Birds is a novel full of jubilant calamity, escapade, and roguery and Milton has under-packed. Featuring a brash cast of characters that shout and shine from the pages and steamroll Milton at every turn, this book is that rare thing—both hilarious and brilliantly clever. Dirty Birds will have you cheering for a wet-noodle-on-the-lam as he is thrown from one catastrophe to the next in search of love and poetry. Get your hands on Dirty Birds! A brilliant, buoyant, mournful romp.”

–MELISSA BARBEAU, author The Luminous Sea

“In Dirty Birds Morgan Murray has magnificently created one of my favourite narrative perspectives: the diffident anti-hero. This book is Tom Robbins, with grotesquely entertaining characters, dancing between sex and death, sometimes in the same scene. It’s John Irving with a protagonist that draws attention to just how much better everyone else is at everything. And it’s Kurt Vonnegut, carrying you through a quilt of strange scenes that leap from tumbleweed to high-speed chase in a single page and have you contemplating the meaning of life. It pulls you out of your own world where you are probably doing something interesting and important, and transports you to nowhere-Saskatewan, where you are hanging off every word of the terrible poetry of an entirely average man-child. It would be a coming-of-age story, except Milton barely advances. But in that way it is so real, and you love him anyway, rooting for him to become someone you can be proud of. I LOVED this book, and I kind of want a sequel, and the idea of a sequel about a guy who’s arguably learned nothing is maybe a TERRIBLE idea and that makes me love this book even more.”

–JENNY MITCHELL, Bird City and CFRU Radio, Guelph

“Fortune or misfortune? Fate or coincidence? Genius or idiocy? Ah, the polarity that runs rampant throughout this highly entertaining and adventurous love story where passion keeps sprinting headlong into reality, learning nothing from the crashes. I love this amusing story, which reminds me a lot of the one time I met Leonard Cohen, whom I thought was very, very nice?”

–VISH KHANNA, Kreative Kontrol

“Morgan Murray has crafted a playful, stylish, hilarious novel about a young artist not coming of age. He has taken the cliché of the sad, gifted young man ascending to literary greatness and turned it upside down. This is a novel sprinkled with sketches, peppered with footnotes, and dripping with a scalding, humble irony. This is the classic genre of the Künstlerroman dragged kicking and screaming into the contemporary Canadian writing scene.”

–TOM HALFORD, author Deli Meat

“It’s good, but do you have to swear so much?”

–MORGAN’S MOM