Stealing the Wave: The epic struggle between Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo by Andy Martin

We are in a strange element here. Andy Martin's fluid prose perfectly befits his subject, which is the turbulent rivalry between two big-wave surfers of hugely differing character - Ken Bradshaw, a truculent, muscular Texan established throughout the 1970s and early 1980s as the supreme operator, and Mark Foo, his audacious younger rival.

They are, in Martin's phrase, "the Old Guard and the Young Gun" and he details their conflict with care and relish. Bradshaw is a product of a military family, and, although he turns his back on the conventional ambitions his parents had for him, his attitude to surfing is tantamount to warfare. The waves are there to be beaten, subjugated to his will. Anyone getting in his way is removed. When Foo, the newcomer, has the temerity to steal a wave from him, he yanks his board from under him and bites a chunk out of it.

Foo is the antithesis of Bradshaw - a natural talent, a graceful, handsome Chinese-American whose media savvy habitually throws the older man into a confusion of rage and envy.

The moves and counter-moves play themselves out over a decade before Foo, the pin-up boy of the surf magazines, perishes in a freak accident at Maverick's Beach in northern California in November 1994, unleashing a flood of eulogies, many of which feature his assertion in a BBC interview that dying in a big wave would be "a glamorous way to go ... a great way to go".

Martin's narrative, part factual, part fanciful - there are conversations, for instance, between the two protagonists that have been recreated as if for a novel - sweeps the reader along like one of the awesome incoming walls of water at Waimea Bay. At times, the smart, American tone becomes a little relentless - it is like being pounded by a tidal wave of cool - but generally Martin stays on his surfboard.

As a surfer himself, Martin knew both these driven characters and does a fine job in revealing the motivations that impelled them from the shore, endlessly. As Bradshaw still likes to say: "If you ask me to choose, I'll choose - to surf."

This is also a book which, with the dedication of a devotee, contains wave after wave of attempts to describe the endlessly fluctuating nature of water itself. It is like listening to mountaineers talking about the changing moods of Everest - a fascinating glimpse into obsession.