📚 Books listed on the website are not necessarily in stock and may need to be ordered 📚 (1/2)

Website orders and inquiries are processed from Monday to Friday (2/2)

Book background
Book cover of Barbarian Days

Barbarian Days

A Surfing Life

William Finnegan

18
Coup de coeur
Coup de coeur (Sports), by Laure
Between the memories of a surfer, the wanderings of a journalist and a social vision of all the places crossed, this book is an ideal travel companion that takes you immediately on board! From the sun-kissed shores of California to the wild waves of Hawaii, then all the way to the untamed coasts of South Africa, and even the remote corners of Fiji and Indonesia, it's a global surfing adventure. Think of it like a passport to the world of surfing, with each stop a new chapter in Finnegan's quest to conquer the perfect wave. Even if youve never surfed, youll feel the ocean calling!

Winner of the Pulitzer Price 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

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 10 May 2016
Dimensions: 126 x 197 x 34 mm
ISBN: 9781472151414