Imagine a City

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 *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 *Dreamy and erudite… [Vanhoenacker is] a most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view – Melanie Reid * The Times *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 *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 *More personal [than Skyfaring], but with the same reassuringly precise and perceptive voice – Tom Robbins * Financial Times, Summer Reads of 2022 *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 BottonA 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 GaleRefreshingly 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

Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial airline pilot and the author of the international bestseller Skyfaring and How to Land a Plane. A regular contributor to the New York Times and the Financial Times, he has also written for Wired, The Times and the Los Angeles Times. He worked in business before starting his flight training in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the globe. Described as ‘a poet of the skies’ (Spectator), Mark changes how readers view the world.

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