Piers Paul Read was born in Beaconsfield, England, the son of poet, essayist, and art critic Herbert Read and Margaret Ludwig Read. When Read was eight his family moved to the rural north of Yorkshire, the scene of Herbert Read's own childhood, which he so movingly described in The Innocent Eye (1947). The elder Read was a humanist, anarchist, and skeptic, a lifelong opponent of the capitalist system whose political concerns would provide a major theme of his son's novels. That influence was balanced, however, by the religious convictions of Read's mother, whom her son has remembered as "an emotional, musical, unpredictable convert to Catholicism." At his mother's insistence Read was sent to Ampleforth College, a private school run by Benedictine monks, that would provide much of the material for the first part of his novel, Monk Dawson (1969).

Read left Ampleforth with relief at the age of sixteen. Rather...