There he came into contact with German writers in the Gruppe 47, the French nouveau romancier Michel Butor, and the Polish novelist, diarist and playwright, Witold Gombrowicz,[2] and worked on his first novel Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966).
He later enrolled in an academy for writers funded by the Ford Foundation, the Literarisches Colloquium, where he made friends with fellow members Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe.
[3] His stay in Berlin inspired his second novel The Junkers (1968, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize) and confirmed the general sympathy towards the Germans that he felt on account of his mother's part-German ancestry.
After his plotless first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1967), Read's fiction adopted a more traditional narrative structure with both contemporary and historical settings.
Three of his historical novels – The Junkers (1968), Polonaise (1976), The Free Frenchman (1986), are set in Continental Europe around World War II; and Alice in Exile (2001) in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Read's contemporaneous novels – A Married Man (1979), A Season in the West (1988), and The Misogynist (2010) - are ironic critiques of the manners and morals of the English upper-middle classes.
There are elements of the thriller in The Villa Golitsyn (1981), On the Third Day (1990), A Patriot in Berlin (1995), Knights of the Cross (1997) and The Death of a Pope (2009), though these too show Read's historical, political and religious concerns.
He has also contributed to moral and religious controversies with a pamphlet Quo Vadis: The Subversion of the Catholic Church (1991), and essays and articles collected in Hell and Other Destinations (2006).
Read's novels A Married Man (1984) and The Free Frenchman (1988) were adapted for television; Alive was made into a feature film by the director Frank Marshal in 1993; and Monk Dawson by Tom Waller in 1998.
Read's first notable success was his novel Monk Dawson (1969), which won him a Hawthornden Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was later made into the 1998 film of the same name by Tom Waller.
Read writes in a fairly traditional, linear style and he often uses plot elements from popular fiction, especially the thriller, like espionage, murder and conspiracy theories.
Many of his books show a great interest and sympathy especially for Germany – quite unusual in British literature – and for Eastern European countries like Russia and Poland.