Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea by Jaimal Yogis
Wisdom Publications £8.99; 200pp Buy the book

Chasing Dean: Surfing America's Hurricane States by Tom Anderson
Summersdale £7.99; 320pp Buy the book

The Surfing Tribe: A History of Surfing in Britain by Roger Mansfield
Orca Publications £24.99; 208pp Buy the book

The imagery of surfing is everywhere. In Las Vegas casinos, posters of bronzed surfers tucking into turquoise tubes are as prevalent as those of diamond-bedecked women and fast cars. The message - that surfing offers a slice of paradise - is unambiguous. It has been enthusiastically co-opted by any number of mainstream brands, including Pepsi, which produced an advert in which David Beckham was cast as a surf dude, and American Express, which produced a series of commercials in which the Hawaiian big-wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton was as much a star as were the likes of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese.

The ubiquity of surfing suggests that it has long since abandoned its countercultural status, so too the fact that what were once little more than garden-shed operations have now become major international corporations.

Here in Britain there is even a university degree in surfing. Thanks to the University of Plymouth students can emerge from three years of watery work with a BSc (Hons) in surf science and technology, a course so successful that it has been exported to Australia. But for all its popularity, it is a fair bet that Plymouth's surfing undergraduates do not tackle surfing literature.

For a long time surfing has stood alone among adrenalin sports in not having produced a substantive literary tradition. While mountaineering and boxing have spawned novels and nonfiction with appeal and durability beyond their immediate audience, there are few literary works on surfing. Those that are tend to be autobiographical - Daniel Duane's Caught Inside, for example, or Allan Weisbecker's “road trip to the end of the road”, In Search of Captain Zero.

And yet surfing offers as much - if not more - by way of beauty, drama and passion as any other sport, as brilliantly evoked in the two stand-out surfing novels, Tim Winton's Breath (2008) and Kem Nunn's 1998 “surf noir” potboiler The Dogs of Winter. But does the publication, this summer, of three new books on surfing herald the turning of the tide?

In Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea, the American author Jaimal Yogis fuses Eastern mysticism and surfing in an autobiographical coming-of-age saga. Yogis ran away from inland California to Hawaii at 16, after his parents divorced. His life until then had been typical - “soccer and swim team, keg-stands at the river, fireworks and football” - save for one thing: the sea. Having spent a formative part of his childhood living on the Portuguese island of Terceira, Yogis writes that “the sea never left me: I couldn't let go. Or it wouldn't let go. Or both.”

This sense of uncertainty underpins Yogis's subsequent quest for meaning not merely in waves, but in life. The result is a heartfelt and honest work, whose lively, self-deprecating style enables the reader to empathise with Yogis at every stage of his journey, whether he's fleeing home, immersed in Buddhist ritual in a French monastery, grappling with surf Nazis in Santa Cruz or suffering for his art while on board a commercial fishing boat. His art proves to be writing, but his embrace of the surfer's search - he kept the faith by subway journeys to surf New York's freezing winter waves - is what gets him there.

Yogis has a kindred spirit in Tom Anderson, a young writer from Porthcawl, South Wales. Anderson's first book, Riding the Magic Carpet, about his dream of surfing the fabled tubular waves of Jeffrey's Bay in South Africa, was a hit among the UK surfing community and now, two years later, he embarks on another classic surfer's search. In Chasing Dean: Surfing America's Hurricane States, Anderson travels the eastern US seaboard during hurricane season, chasing waves created by Hurricane Dean.

On his journey, in the company of a childhood friend from Wales, Anderson surfs any number of destinations as well as Sandy Hook, New York, “the place from which a surf photographer had taken a picture of someone riding a wave in front of the burning Twin Towers on 9/11”. Anderson doesn't dwell on this cameo, but its symbolism is starkly of a piece with the central question of Chasing Dean: how can a surfer reconcile the fact that his supremely hedonistic pleasure comes at a price?

The waves surfed by Anderson and his friend, Dr Marc Rhys, are the product of weather systems that have wreaked carnage thousands of miles away, but if Chasing Dean's chief dilemma remains unresolved, Anderson's sharp and witty style, allied with a poignant exploration of the nature of friendship, takes his second book into contemporary Kerouac territory.

Rather more factual is Roger Mansfield's The Surfing Tribe: A History of Surfing in Britain. Newquay-based Mansfield is a pioneer of British surfing and in The Surfing Tribe he documents its rise up to 1990.

Mansfield's source material is excellent, yielding, among others, the tale of the first man to ride waves in Europe, Pip Staffieri, who sold ice cream in Newquay in the 1930s. In 1940 Staffieri learnt to surf the Atlantic waves of Cornwall on a hollow wooden surfboard that he built himself.

With many similarly illuminating vignettes, captivating archive photographs and a wide-ranging scope, The Surfing Tribe ably illustrates the richness of Britain's surfing history. It is one that may yet produce a surfing novel on a par with the work of Winton and Nunn. The tide is turning, and the literary surfing wave is being caught.

Surf Nation: In Search of the Fast Lefts and Hollow Rights of Britain and Ireland by Alex Wade is published by Pocket Books at £7.99

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