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
*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
*Times Literary Supplement*
Dreamy and erudite... [Vanhoenacker is] a most likeable,
warm-hearted narrator with an original world view
*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
*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
*Air Mail*
More personal [than Skyfaring], but with the same reassuringly
precise and perceptive voice
*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
*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*
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