For the past eight months or so, we’ve both been obsessed over one particular book — Alice Winn’s In Memoriam — and it’s just your luck that we’ve finally reached its release date! Now all of you will be able to read this book too and suffer just like we did! But, just in case you needed a bit more convincing, check out our review below!
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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
Alice Winn
Rep: Jewish gay mc, gay mc
CWs: gore, violence, suicide, period typical antisemitism, period typical homophobia, internalised homophobia, PTSD, panic attacks
Release: 7th March 2023
In Memoriam is, at heart, a romance. It might not follow quite your conventional romance novel trappings — it is less about a love forming, than a love being tested — but I do stand by my description of it as a romance. Because, at its heart, it’s about love.
This is a book I initially read in August 2022, a full 8 months before its release, and I reread it more recently in an attempt to write a review that might do it justice. Who’s to say if that’s going to work, but we’ll at least give it a go.
The story, very briefly, follows two boys at school around the start of the First World War. Gaunt, who has a German mother, joins up on his eighteenth birthday following pressure from his family who are having to weather suspicions from members of society. Later, Ellwood follows him to war, not wanting him to be alone. They are, already, in love with one another, but each believes it’s not reciprocated.
Consequently, this is a book that decides it’s going to rip your heart out from the first page. There is no respite. If you take a breath after finishing the first chapter, after all that yearning, thinking that you might have earned yourself a break for a bit, then you would be wrong. It just does not let up. Not just in the relationship between Gaunt and Ellwood (in itself something that’ll have you screaming into your pillow), but also the way the book shows the brutality of war and its effect on the people going through it. You, just as much as Ellwood, want to snarl at the woman offering him a white feather by the end.
But what this book does so well is offset the horrors of war and all the sorrows with moments of humour and love. That makes those moments all the more poignant and all the sadder, their juxtaposition with the camaraderie and genuine humour found even amongst the hell that is the trenches. And it’s not horror that’s glossed over or spoken about in vague terms — this book doesn’t shy away from anything in that respect.
Gaunt and Ellwood’s love, then, becomes all the sweeter for it. I said earlier the book’s full of yearning between them, but it’s also a love that gets tested and, although you as the reader are reasonably sure they’ll come out of things okay, you aren’t always completely so. This is a book about disillusionment and loss of innocence and that impacts on their love as well. The journeys they go on contrast each other too: Ellwood goes from seeing only the beauty in the world to being forced to confront the ugliness too (and later, that ends up being all he can see), while Gaunt is only too aware of the ugliness but comes to value the beauty all the more. In amongst a changing world, and their changing outlooks, their love becomes the only constant.
So, I’m not sure if I’ve done this book even an ounce of justice with this review. It was, almost without question, the best book I read in 2022. It’s probably also the best book I’ll read in 2023. Yes, it’s only March, but if you give it a read, you’ll understand why I say that.
So, have we convinced you that you want to read this book?
