Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, was published in 2023. This was one of my favourite reads that year and it's become a permanent fixture on my bookshelf. I’ve just been re-reading it and I love it as much as I did the first time. Set during the First World War, it follows a group of boys at an English public school in the countryside (called Preshute, modeled after the author’s alma mater Marlborough College). Most of the boys see the war as an opportunity for heroism, and are inspired rather than daunted by news of the deaths of their slightly older schoolmates - deaths they first learn about, through the "In Memoriam" column of the school magazine, which fills steadily as the war goes on.
Among these innocents are Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood - best friends, each secretly in love with the other, and each convinced that the feeling isn't returned. Gaunt, who is half-German, plunges into the war partly to shield his family from rising anti-German sentiment at home, and partly to get away from Ellwood. They exchange letters for many months. But when Gaunt is injured in battle, Ellwood enlists, much to Gaunt's dismay, and the story moves from the idyllic world of the school into the trenches of the Western Front.
The young men who keep showing up at the front have very little chance of surviving, many die in ways that are senseless and tragic. Winn combines the brutality of the war with a tender love story in a way that never feels clichéd. There's humour, too, and it helps balance the horror. There's a section in the book about a group of captured English and French soldiers relentlessly attempting to escape their German POW camp that was hilarious.
This is a heartbreaking and yet hopeful novel.