This book held me in an iron grip the whole way through. It was haunting and beautiful and absolutely filled to the brim with emotion and feeling—however, this novel HURT. I spent a lot of it with a lump in my stomach because I was anxious, on edge, and just entirely invested.

Both Gaunt and Elwood are mesmerizing as characters and while they're not always likable they are two young men who it is impossible not to be rooting for. At the forty-five percent mark, I had to take a break from reading because my stomach was in knots, I haven't been this emotionally attached to a book in a long time.

The writing style was immersive and perfectly suited to the story. The inclusion of obituaries and letters home to the families of dead soldiers was incredibly hard-hitting and while it offered more sucker punches it added to the raw, tender vibe of the novel. This was an incredibly heavy story and the author didn't falter for a second when making sure it fully conveyed the horror of the situations Gaunt and Elwood were in. Winn also doesn't shy away from descriptions of awful scenarios and injuries that the men on the front suffered and while at times it was uncomfortable to read it also added an edge to the story that made it that much more real and impactful.

This is an amazing, ground-breaking debut that delivers a terrific, haunting story with characters that are impossible not to care for. I absolutely adored this although it still hurts.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this in exchange for an honest review.

ALICE WINN – IN MEMORIAM *****

I read this novel in advance of publication through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

What an amazing tour de force this debut novel is. It is the story of a group of patriotic young men, friends at a public school, who sign up to fight in WWW1 even though most of them are not of age to do so. They believe in glory, have a rose-tinted view of what war is, not realising the atrocities they will witness: their friends cannon fodder, faces shot off, blown up, patched up, sent back to the front.

What makes this story unusual is that it told through two principle characters, Ellwood and Gaunt, both in their teens and raring to fight for their country, each in love with the other when such love was illegal, neither realising how the other felt. This is a switchback of emotions. Young men like Ellwood and Gaunt from public schools were automatically given the ranks of officers, while those from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds became their subordinates.

Throughout the human story comes the appalling waste and horrors. You are there, watching young men being forced into No Man’s Land, row after row of them shot at or blown to pieces, staggering over the bodies of their comrades fallen in front of them. What makes this even more terrible is that a century later nothing has changed; countries still wage war on others and the carnage continues.

If you cannot stomach descriptions of injury, perhaps this is not the story for you, but in a way, you should stomach it on behalf of all the young men who gave their lives in the most appalling of conditions, tens of thousands of them like Ellwood and Gaunt. Young people in particular need to learn about those who died to give them the freedoms they have today. From today’s perspective it is extraordinary that teenagers defended our country by giving up their lives.

This is an important book, raw and graphically written, with a dozen characters you feel by the end that you know. It needs to be read.

In Memoriam is a novel that tells the love story between two schoolboys-turned-soldiers during the First World War. For Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, when war breaks out in 1914 it feels far away from them at their boarding school, where their main problem is the fact they both believe their love for the other is unrequited. However, when Gaunt's German mother asks him to lie about his age and enlist to protect the family from anti-German sentiment, he agrees, and finds himself at the front facing the horrors of war. Not long later, Ellwood joins him, and their world of schoolboy troubles seems miles away, even as more of their classmates turn up around them.

In many ways, this book is exactly as you'd expect, similar to other First World War novels and especially those that depict love stories. There's lots of historical material woven into the plot, as the afterword explains, and a good amount of depiction of the complications around war, like fighting in one despite being against it. The move from schoolboys to soldiers and the varied ways in which the characters react to this is also very interesting, from Ellwood and Gaunt's respective literary interests clashing with the realities of war to some of their schoolmates' jovial reactions.

I had trepidation reading the novel as personally for me the combination of the tormented slow love story and the threat of death looming over everything doesn't always make for a book I enjoy reading, but I did appreciate what the narrative did with the characters and the love story, managing to encapsulate horror and brutality, but also perseverance and small tender moments, making it less unrelentingly bleak and heartbreaking than I was expecting from the title and my assumptions. Thanks particularly to the characters and relationships, In Memoriam is likely to be popular with a lot of people. It is a love story that looks at war, class, and historical queerness, with a narrative that's quite dramatic and maybe too neat, but still works for the genre.

This book was fantastic. I loved everything about it. Its the first book in over a year I would willingly reread. The characters, the writing. Oh my gosh, I loved it. Thank you thank you thank you for such a moving, wonderful book.

There is so much about this book that i love. As someone who's read quite a bit of historical fiction especially on WW1, i was curious about how In Memoriam would go about establishing it's own space amongst the 'war torn romances' and i think it certainly does. Gaunt and Ellwood feel real. They have their own personalities and minds aside from one another and that's so important to me. Their love is complex and so are they as individuals. As well as exploring life in the trenches Alice Winn also shines a light on the almost otherworldly circle that is British public schools, particularly all boys ones, where they go about lives completely removed from society governed by traditions that have been in place for hundreds of years. There is so much to be said on that!
I would've loved for In Memoriam to follow Maud's life in even more depth as i felt like her character could do so much more and she provided another new perspective.
Overall however, this was a really great read, one that i would love to come back to, to experience all over again.

In lots of ways this is a told-before story for anyone familiar with the literature of WW1 in fiction, memoir and history - so it's to Winn's credit that she imbues the whole thing with an aura of freshness, reminding us, all over again, of those bullet points: the fatal Edwardian mix of empire, public school superiority, and masculinity that still believed in dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; the early twentieth century 'love that dare not say its name'; and the sheer dogged brutality of the conflict, especially the trench warfare of the western front. Add to that a Susan Hill-esque Strange Meeting vibe of covert love and desire, and plenty of men writing war poetry before having to deal with life-changing wounds and we're in familiar Pat Barker territory, with even a bit of tunnelling that is reminiscent of, though functionally different from, Birdsong.

However, despite all the usual suspects turning up, this still stands up as a creditable and credible story in its own right, and I think that's because we believe in and are made to deeply care about the central characters, Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, and it's their relationship which gives heart to the book. It is a little convenient that Ellwood has a Jewish mother and Gaunt a German one in order to wring some particular pathos from their situation, but it's not generally over-played.

My slight qualm is that there's a section of the book from about 50% that veers towards the melodramatic.

Despite this rather manipulated pathos, this is both tender and horrific with a gorgeous, unsentimental love story at its heart.