Imagine a City
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  • Published: 12 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529194173
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download

Imagine a City

A Pilot Sees the World

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Oct 2023
Audiobook
12 May 2022
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The bestselling author of Skyfaring celebrates the world’s cities from his perspective as a pilot

A love letter to the cities of the world, from the airline pilot-author of Skyfaring.

Mark Vanhoenacker grew up in his small hometown, spinning the illuminated globe in his bedroom and dreaming of elsewhere - of distant, real cities, and a perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These places were the source of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination: streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in cities where Mark could be anyone, perhaps even himself.

Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet, touching down in the cities he imagined as a child. He experiences our metropolises in short layover visits that repeat over weeks, months or even years, giving him a unique perspective on the urbanization of the world.

In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left. In chapters that explore emblematic facets of each city's identity - the sweeping roads of Los Angeles, the gates of Jeddah, the intricate, dream-inspired plan of Brasília - he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home.
  • Published: 12 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529194173
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Mark Vanhoenacker

Mark Vanhoenacker left academia to work as a management consultant, a position that afforded him regular opportunities to stare out of aeroplane windows and recall childhood dreams of becoming a pilot. He began his flight training in 2001. Today, as a Senior First Officer for British Airways, Mark flies Boeing 747s to major cities around the world. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and Slate. When his head is not in the clouds, he divides his time between London and New York.

portrait photo of Mark Vanhoenacker

Also by Mark Vanhoenacker

Skyfaring
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Praise for Imagine a City

A enriching memoir of how a sensitive, introverted boy's yearning for escape and acceptance found its fulfilment in the life of an airline pilot... A touching survey of human dreams and endeavours and a hymn to the quiet pleasures of returning, in the flesh or in memory, to the intimate geography of one's hometown

Patrick Gale

Mark Vanhoenacker is a beautiful, lyrical writer who uses his experience as a pilot to bring us constantly in touch with the transcendent and the other-worldly

Alain de Botton

Refreshingly personal and moving... This absorbing modern twist on the age-old story of flying the nest, yet yearning for home, will transport you around the globe and back again without leaving your seat

Mark Ovenden, author of AIRLINE MAPS and LONDON UNDERGROUND BY DESIGN

An utterly remarkable and original travel book. Like Jan Morris and Pico Iyer, Vanhoenacker weaves memoir and travelogue, using his unusual perch as a pilot to take us on an incredible journey to dozens of cities around the world. Like Italo Calvino, he somehow weaves it all into one, a painfully beautiful cubist city of memory and dreams that rises out of his warm and lyrical prose

Andrew Blum, author of TUBES and THE WEATHER MACHINE

A tour de force of descriptive power and honesty; I can think of no other book like this one

Tom Zoellner, winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Dreamy and erudite... [Vanhoenacker is] a most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view

Melanie Reid, The Times

I absolutely love the way Mark Vanhoenacker writes about the world; he gives you a whole new way of seeing

Jenny Colgan, author of SUNRISE BY THE SEA

Vanhoenacker is exceptionally well travelled, and an exceptionally curious and widely read observer... He doesn't waste an hour, and with every return his engagement with each city deepens... Superb

Jonathan Buckley, Times Literary Supplement

Imagine a City is really about home... a variation on the Great Expectations narrative, with our young hero feeling uncomfortable where he grows up, flying the nest for a series of transformative experiences but discovering he can never quite leave home nor fully return

Spectator

Quietly thoughtful without being either self-conscious or -indulgent. Vanhoenacker retains a refreshing sense of good fortune and even amazement that one can step into a cylindrical metal tube and emerge hours later into different air, different sunlight and a different world picture

Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post

Imagine a City... will enchant and even move anyone who feared in recent years for the future of both travel and urbanism

Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

More personal [than Skyfaring], but with the same reassuringly precise and perceptive voice

Tom Robbins, Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2022*

What makes Mark Vanhoenacker's Imagine a City such a joy, is that this is a travel book entirely rooted in modernity and globalization... but which nonetheless retains the wide-eyed wonder, not so much of a 19th-century explorer as of a medieval pilgrim

Tim Hannigan, Asian Review of Books

In this new work, Vanhoenacker... plunges deeper into his own past growing up in Pittsfield as a gay man... His autobiographical vignettes are searching and touching, delivered with an affectionate lyricism

Pico Iyer, Air Mail

Mark Vanhoenacker...weaves an account of this hugely gifted writer's small-town gay boyhood through evocations of the cities around the world he has come to love as an airline pilot

Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

Beautiful, meditative and insightful

Shafik Meghji, author of Crossed off the Map: Travels in Bolivia

Few books nowadays truly break new ground but Mark Vanhoenacker succeeds in doing so with Imagine a City. Sensitive, smart and utterly fascinating, I have recommended it to almost everyone I know

Caroline Eden, journalist and author of Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland

Mark Vanhoenacker is more than a British Airways pilot with the soul of a poet - he is without doubt the greatest travel writer since Bruce Chatwin

Tony Parsons, award-winning journalist and bestselling author of Your Neighbour’s Wife

You couldn't ask for a more literary pilot to have up at the sharp end of your next flight than Mark Vanhoenacker...[but] flying isn't so front and centre of his book Imagine a City, this time it's about where his flying takes him.

Tony Wheeler, author and co-founder of Lonely Planet