Imagine a City: A Pilot Sees the World

Description

The bestselling author of Skyfaring celebrates the world's cities from his perspective as a pilot **A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2022** '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 'A moving account of personal unbelonging' THE TIMES 'Vanhoenacker... has a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities... Intimate and thoughtful' PICO IYER, AIR MAIL ___________________ 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. These places were sources of endless fascination and escape- 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 these metropolises in short layover visits that repeat month after month and year after year, giving him a unique perspective on the places that form our urban world. Interweaving 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. Exploring the emblematic facets of each city's identity - the sweeping roads of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the intricate, dream-inspired plan of Brasilia - he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home. '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 'Evocative... Lyrical... At the keyboard, Vanhoenacker has danced, and on his pages there is tumbling mirth indeed' Boston Globe

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.

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 *