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.

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 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, and 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. As the Chair of the William Hill Award, Grahame Sharpe commented; “as we follow William Finnegan’s story we see not just the maturing of a boy into a man, but of a rebellious soul coming to terms with society on his terms.”

Already a recipient of 2016’s Pulitzer Prize for Biography and famously on President Barack Obama’s summer reading list, Barbarian Days is a soaring elegy to not just surfing but the very ideas of freedom, commitment, and community.

For a number of us at Waterstones, this is not just the best sports book of 2016 but the finest biography we’ve read overall in a year of fierce competition.