The Great War on Love
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IN MEMORIAM:  A Novel
by Alice Winn
Knopf. 382 pages, $29.

IN MEMORIAM is an ambitious debut novel about the love between two English schoolboys who become soldiers during World War I. Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are friends in a public school, each secretly yearning for the other but unable to express it. When Gaunt enlists, Ellwood follows soon afterward. Amid the horrors of battle, they finally strike up a relationship.

            The novel captures the atmosphere of elite public schools at the time, especially the rampant, barely concealed homoeroticism, often mixed with violence.

Charles Green, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.