In Memoriam

GMA BUZZ PICK • INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER AND AWARD WINNER • A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I • ‘Will live in your mind long after you’ve closed the final pages.’ —Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait

A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR

‘In Memoriam is the story of a great tragedy, but it is also a moving portrait of young love.’—The New York Times

It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front 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. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will 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.


Genre: Historical

"A tender story as much about love as it is about war." - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

"Alice Winn has pulled off a remarkable feat in making these men and the horrors of the First World War come so viscerally alive. It was like looking at a black and white photograph which has been colourised, and suddenly you understand that these shadowy people from the past also dreamed and cried and breathed just as we do now. I was completely absorbed, moved, and transported." - Claire Fuller

"I read through the night to finish this blistering debut, too feverishly engrossed to sleep. When was the last time characters in a novel seemed so real to me, so cherishable, so alive? Alice Winn has made familiar history fresh; no account of the First World War has made me feel so vividly its horror, or how irrevocably it mutilated the world. That In Memoriam is also an extraordinary love story is a sign of Winn's wild ambition and her prodigious gifts: this is a novel that claims both beauty and brutality, the whole range of human life." - Garth Greenwell

"Assured, affecting and moving. Alice Winn has written a devastating love story between two young men . . . Gaunt and Ellwood will live in your mind long after you've closed the final pages." - Maggie O'Farrell

"IN MEMORIAM is a gripping and unsentimental love story that brings the First World War to life in a vividly new way . . . an unforgettable novel, one I stayed up all night to finish, with characters I loved almost as much as they loved each other. . . Birdsong for a new generation." - Joanna Quinn