Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and William Hill Sports Book of the Year: Barbarian Days is a deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer looking for transcendence ''that recalls early James Salter'' (Geoff Dyer, Observer)

Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.

New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world''s most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man''s gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.

''Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard'' Sports Illustrated

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography announced on 18/4/2016.
Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year announced on 24/11/2016

• | Author: William Finnegan
• | Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• | Publication Date: May 10, 2016
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781472151414
• | ISBN-10: 1472151410