I started reading this book a while ago. Not long before I was going on holiday with my family. I had heard good things about the book and had been looking forward to reading it; but it just didn’t feel like a summer holiday read. So I put it down, and it was a while before I picked it back up again. I am incredibly glad that I did pick it back up again though, as it is a fantastic book.

A gripping, heart-shattering love story between two soldiers in the First World War.

It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood – not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt’s German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.

The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.

In Memoriam is the story of Ellwood and Gaunt, told from both of their perspectives (there are chapters told from one boy’s perspective and other chapters from the other boy’s). We first meet these two at boarding a school, where they are idealistic young men fighting their own feelings for each other, and often fighting each other and their friends. Their idealism extends to the war and what it must be like to be fighting, and even dying, heroically on the battlefield in service of their country. While they are too young to enlist in the army, like many boys of the time, they enlist, are made Officers and find themselves on the front line in the First World War.

The book follows Ellwood and Gaunt throughout their experiences in the War. You see them in their training, dealing with losing friends and the horrors of war. You see them dealing with their feelings for each other. You see them coping with loss, injury, depression, anger and frustration. You see them absolutely at their worst. Alice Winn does not hold back in describing what war is really like in all its awful, gory, horrifying detail. This is a book that, at times, is bleak – even relentlessly bleak. But it is also full of hope and optimism.

This is a book about class – the boys are all in a prestigious public school at the start of the war, and all find themselves as Officers straight away, rather than Privates. Their privileged position is examined in the way that the Officer from a more ordinary background is passed over for Captain in favour of these very young boys who all went to the same school, and how he deals with being passed over because of his background. In Memoriam is also a book about mental health, looking at how trauma affects the boys, both now and into their adulthood – the trauma of what they are exposed to, of their friends dying, of the things they have to do in battle, and the things that happen to them.

The book explores what life would be like for gay men during a time when it was illegal to be in a homosexual relationship. Ellwood and Gaunt not only have to deal with the teenage angst of wondering whether the person they are romantically interested in is interested in them as well, but also keep this relationship secret.

It’s hard to say, with a book like this that does deal with the horrors of war, that you enjoyed it, but I did. I thought it was a fantastic, extraordinary book. It doesn’t glorify war and it doesn’t gloss over the awful side of war, or the awful effects it has on those fighting the war. It is an epic story that it brilliantly told.

I would highly recommend reading it, although you do have to have a fairly strong stomach for it. This was one of my favourite reads of 2024, and I would give it 5 out of 5 stars.