Peter Englund’s intense and bighearted new book, “The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War,” begins with a long dramatis personae of the sort that can make your heart sink.

Here is advice for proceeding: Gently excise this page and make it your bookmark. You will be getting to know these people very well in Mr. Englund’s novelistic telling, and this dramatis personae will function as your GPS, a beacon during those few moments when, like one of his men and women, you are confused and bereft in the fog of war.

Mr. Englund is a Swedish historian and journalist. He is also the new permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. What he has written here is an unusual book, one he describes, not inaccurately, as “a work of anti-history.” It contains few big names, major treaties or famous battles; there are almost no ambassadors, dashing journalists or discussions of tactics and materiel. It’s not so much a book about what happened, he explains, as “a book about what it was like.” It’s about “feelings, impressions, experiences and moods.”

KRIGETS VARDAG. Det är lika skrämmande som ­underhållande när Peter Englund låter oss följa mänskliga öden under första världskriget. Utdrag ur brev, dagböcker och självbiografier låter oss stå axel vid axel med det meningslösa krigets Envar. Boken är ett mästerverk, skriver Mats Gellerfelt.