Imagine a City

Author Mark Vanhoenacker
Narrator Kyle Soller
Publisher Random House
Run Time 12 hours and 3 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Aviation skills and piloting, Biography and non-fiction prose, Human geography, Memoirs, Society and Social Sciences, Travel and holiday, Travel writing, Urban communities.

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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

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

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