Faber announces Stewart Lee’s March of the Lemmings

Faber & Faber is delighted to announce a new book from multiple British Comedy Award and BAFTA winning comedian and writer Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings, publishing on 5 September to coincide with a new touring show, Snowflake/Tornado.

As a Metropolitan Elitist Snowflake, Stewart Lee was disappointed by the Brexit referendum result of 2016. But he knew how to weaponise his inconvenience.

He would treat all his subsequent writing, until we left the EU, as interrelated episodes of a complete work. The cast of characters include Lemming-obsessed Michael Gove, violent tanning-salon entrepreneur Tommy Robinson and Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Bumboys Letterbox Cake Disaster Weightloss Haircut Bullshit Johnson. A dramatic chorus is made up of online commenters and Kremlin bots. And Lee himself would play the defeated, unreliable narrator-hero, whose resolve and tolerance would gradually unravel as the horror show dragged on. Until the 29 March, 2019, when it would all definitely be over.

Drawing on three years of newspaper columns, a complete transcript of the Content Provider stand-up show, and Lee’s caustic footnote commentary, March of the Lemmings is the scathing, riotous record the Brexit era deserves.

Stewart Lee began stand-up in 1988 at the age of 20, and won the Hackney Empire new act of the year award in 1990. In 2001, he co-wrote the libretto for Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, which went on to win four Olivier awards. His most recent live shows have been Carpet Remnant World (2011), Much A Stew About Nothing (2013), Room With A Stew (2015) and Content Provider (2017). In December 2011, he won Best Male TV Comic and Best Comedy Entertainment Performance at the British Comedy Awards and his BBC show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle won a BAFTA in 2012. In 2018, he was described by The Times as the word’s greatest living stand-up comedian.