William Finnegan · 2015 · global

Pulitzer Prize for autobiography. A New Yorker war correspondent's account of the sixty years he spent chasing waves before he would admit in print that he did it - Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, Java, apartheid South Africa, Ocean Beach and Madeira, and the discovery of Tavarua before anyone had built a resort on it.

1. 1
   Los Angeles

   California in the late fifties and sixties, on the fringe of a bubbling megalopolis - a boy whose father works in television, learning to surf before the boom, and going back and forth to Hawaii as the work moves.

2. 2
   Honolulu

   1966, and a haole newcomer navigating an ethnically charged Oahu middle school where being a decent surfer is one of the few ways to assimilate - and Off Diamond Head, the break the first chapter is named for.

3. 3
   Honolua Bay

   Maui, 1971, and the chapter titled 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky - dropping acid and paddling out into huge Honolua, which Finnegan reports with rueful humour and no attempt to make it sound wise.

4. 4
   Tavarua

   1978, and the discovery the book is famous for: two men with knapsacks full of reef charts camping on an uninhabited Fijian island and finding one of the greatest waves in the world, years before anyone built a resort on it.

5. 5
   Kirra

   Australia, 1978 to 1979 - the Gold Coast point break, the shortboard revolution happening around him, and co-writing for the surf magazine Tracks to pay for the next leg.

6. 6
   Grajagan

   Java, and the Asia chapters: Bali, then camping at remote G-Land, then Sumatra and Nias - paratyphoid, the Indonesian black market, and malaria in Thailand that puts him in hospital.

7. 7
   Cape Town

   1980 and after, teaching in a segregated school under apartheid and beginning the reporting career that will make him a New Yorker staff writer - and surfing the Cape breaks between shifts.

8. 8
   San Francisco

   1983 to 1986, Ocean Beach and the big-wave winters - the material that became Playing Doc's Games in the New Yorker in 1992, and the first time he admitted in print that he was a surfer.

9. 9
   Madeira

   1994 to 2003, Jardim do Mar and Paul do Mar - a Portuguese island with enormous waves and no surfers on it yet, which is the last of the great unspoiled discoveries in the book.

10. 10
    New York

    2002 to 2015, and the closing chapter: a war correspondent in his fifties and sixties still driving out to Long Island at dawn for cold Atlantic swell, which is the point the whole book has been making.