Gaunt and Ellwood banter, tease, deal with hazing and get drunk with their classmates, but they also harbor secret worries: Gaunt is German and Ellwood is Jewish, marking them as outsiders, more vulnerable in an England at war. Meanwhile, outside of school, young women hand white feathers to young men in civilian clothes to shame them into enlisting. The school newspaper, The Preshutian, lists the names of dead and wounded older friends. It’s 1914, and the Great War has begun killing their schoolmates. an unforgettable novel, one I stayed up all night to finish, with characters I loved almost as much as they loved each other.Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are best friends and sixth-formers at the English public school Preshute College, an Eton-like boarding school. ' IN MEMORIAM is a gripping and unsentimental love story that brings the First World War to life in a vividly new way.

Gaunt and Ellwood will live in your mind long after you've closed the final pages.' - Maggie O'Farrell author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait

Alice Winn has written a devastating love story between two young men that moves from the sheltered idyll of their public school to the unspeakable horrors of the Western Front during the First World War. 'It's hard to believe that In Memoriam is a debut novel as it's so assured, affecting and moving. She grew up in Paris and was educated in British boarding schools and has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University. 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.Īn epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.Īlice Winn lives in Brooklyn, where she writes screenplays. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. 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.

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.

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. 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. Join us in the bookshop in celebration of Alice Winn's debut novel In Memoriam.

In memoriam alice winn