A pilot's love letter to the world's greatest cities from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Skyfaring


'A journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives' ALAIN DE BOTTON

Growing up in his small hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spun the illuminated globe in his bedroom and dreamt of elsewhere - of distant, real cities, and a perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination.

Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent more than two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in the cities he'd always longed to see. Imagine a City celebrates the metropolises he has come to know and love through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left. From the sweeping roads of Los Angeles and the old gates of Jeddah to the intricate, dream-inspired plan of Brasilia, he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home.

'Vanhoenacker... has a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities... Intimate and thoughtful' PICO IYER, AIR MAIL

'A love letter to the cities he's returned to again and again... Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above' Washington Post

'Eloquent... A love song to cities the world over' Wall Street Journal

About the Author
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.

Reviews
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 Botton
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
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
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
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
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 *
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781529112023
Author Mark Vanhoenacker
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 331g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 130mm * 25mm