
Barbarian Days
A Surfing Life
Click here to join our rewards scheme and earn points on this purchase!
Release Date: 10/05/2016
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)
A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer
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