Imagine a City

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

© Mark Vanhoenacker 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • 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

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