The story focuses on the East African Campaign fought between British and German forces during World War I, and how it affects several people whose paths converge.

The second narrative strand involves Felix Cobb, the studious youngest son of an aristocratic and traditional British military family, every one of whom he despises apart from his older brother Gabriel, a captain.

The latter soon marries his sweetheart Charis (inspiring a certain jealousy in Felix), but war breaks out while Gabriel is on his honeymoon in Normandy, and he makes haste back to his regiment.

Whilst recovering in a Prisoner of War hospital, he develops an infatuation for Erich von Bishop's plump, stubborn wife Liesl, who works there as a nurse.

That bleak comic vision suggests the early Evelyn Waugh, and An Ice-Cream War is a good enough novel, for all its flaws, to persuade me that Mr. Boyd, who was born in 1952, may someday write a great one.