Surfing literature - is there such a thing

I don't really think that surfing and surf culture has been particularly well captured in fiction writing.

Not that I have really, really looked hard to find good surfing writing. If you know of stuff beyond what I am going to suggest below, please tell me via the Comments function.

Dogs of Winter by Kem Nunn is very good in parts. According to Amazon.com:

In The Dogs of Winter, Nunn draws again on the eternal legends and tall tales of surfers. Jack Fletcher is a pill-popping photographer on the skids who lucks into the assignment of photographing the aging surfing legend Drew Harmon and two young pros at the Heart Attacks in Northern California--an appropriately difficult-to-reach and shark-infested "mysto spot" reputed to have 30-foot waves. Not all dangers lurk in the ocean, however. The local Indians are unfriendly to outsiders and to each other; Harmon's young wife is obsessed with Indian witchcraft and a murdered local girl; and Harmon cloaks his own demons in laconic surfer-deity mystique. The hapless Fletcher and a local tribal council worker named Travis McCade desperately try to avert the curl of disaster that builds and breaks in this heavily atmospheric novel.




The descriptions of the coast in Northern California, just on the border with Oregon, made me want to drop everything and go there. A good story, that is of course more than just surfing. But the surfing is epic. Cold water, huge waves, great white sharks. Not the California imaged in the Gidget movies, that's for sure.

But my current favourite, and winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Award for Australian Fiction, is Breath by Tim Winton.

Boy, what to say about this book ...

It is so very moving and probably like no other writing I have ever read captures some of the essence and experience of surfing.

I will not try to summarise the ploy, explain the characters or ponder on what the book might mean to me or anyone else.

If you surf, or you are interested in surfing, or just want to read an exceptional piece of real Australian literature (with a capital L) I could not recommend a better book.

One of the odd things I noticed after reading Breath was that you could view a video trailer on the web. This is below - not just how I feel about this approach to promoting books, but interesting all the same.