Seminary Boy: A Memoir

By age 11, Cornwell had a well-deserved reputation as "an academic reject and troublemaker." Besides running with young thugs in London's East End, he had attacked a nun, a teacher at his school. But after a stranger molested him, he became a devout altar boy and, two years later, a priest-in-training at Cotton College. There he lost his Cockney accent, felt schoolboy crushes and constantly wrestled with an overzealous conscience, his scruples exacerbated by priest-teachers ranging from rigid to predatory. Helping him navigate stormy adolescence was the brilliant and sensible Father Armishaw, literature teacher and music lover, who cared for him as his own troubled father and volatile mother were never able to do. Readers who objected to Cornwell's controversial bestseller Hitler's Pope may not appreciate his portrayal of Catholics in the 1950s, and the memoir police may accuse him of erring on the side of invention, especially since he kept no diaries. Despite its occasional touch of narcissism—his culminating struggle is with "the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth"—the book is a fine read. With a literary novelist's eye for detail and ear for dialogue, Cornwell has written a psychologically astute and often touching coming-of-age story. (June 13)