'In Memoriam' by Alice Winn
- Reed
- Nov 25
- 2 min read
Author: Alice Winn
Rating: A-
Vibe: Devastating WWI love story wrapped in mud, poetry, and impossible choices
There's a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from loving someone and being too afraid to say it—not because you don't know, but because you do. If you never put paint to canvas, you can't ruin the beautiful painting in your mind. That unspoken tension sits at the center of In Memoriam, and Alice Winn captures it with devastating precision.
Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are students at an English boarding school when World War I begins. They love each other—this much is clear—but neither can bring himself to cross that line. What if saying it ruins everything? What if the other doesn't feel the same? And so they orbit each other, full of longing and silence, until the war pulls them apart and into the trenches. What follows is a harrowing, heartrending story about love, loss, and the ways we try to hold onto ourselves when the world is tearing us apart.
I'll be honest: the first quarter of the book was a struggle. Winn hops between perspectives and introduces a large cast of schoolboys, and I kept losing track of who was who. There's also a slight credibility stretch in just how many gay men populate this one boarding school class—even accounting for the fact that queer people have always existed in greater numbers than history likes to admit. But if you can push through that early fog, what awaits you is extraordinary.
The war scenes are devastating. Winn doesn't flinch from the horror—the mud, the gas, the senseless death—and the result is one of the most visceral depictions of WWI I've encountered in fiction. But what makes In Memoriam work is how perfectly balanced it is. The brutality never overshadows the emotional core; instead, it sharpens it. Every moment of tenderness between Gaunt and Ellwood feels hard-won, precious, and fragile.
One of the book's quieter triumphs is what it does with poetry. Ellwood's love of verse is woven throughout the novel, and it becomes a kind of barometer for his humanity. As the war scrapes away at him—at his hope, his idealism, his sense of self—his relationship to poetry shifts. It's a subtle, devastating way for Winn to externalize something internal, and it hit me harder than I expected.
And then there's this: these men fought for a country that would have arrested them. Not for the men they killed, but for the men they loved. That's not ancient history. That's not some distant, unimaginable past. It's a reminder that queer people have always existed, always loved, always served—and been punished for it anyway. There's a particular ache in watching Gaunt and Ellwood navigate a world that demanded their sacrifice but denied their humanity.
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Without spoiling anything, I'll say this: Winn sticks the landing. The ending feels earned—painful, yes, but right. It left me sitting with the book long after I finished it, which is exactly what a novel like this should do.
