A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary [Paperback]

`funny, charming and slender enough to pack in your carry-on...' --Daily Mail

`Simultaneously poignant and terribly funny...de Botton's most imaginative work yet' --Spectator

`Funny, surprising ... [de Botton's] observations on airport life are wry and thought-provoking ... excellent' --Telegraph

`Shrewd, perceptive and gently ironic ... At de Botton's T5, banality and sublimity circle in a perpetual holding pattern.' --Boyd Tonkin, Independent

An uplifting and unique journey through the days and nights of the UK's largest airport

In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton will be invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever Writer in Residence. He will be installed in the middle of Terminal 5 on a raised platform with a laptop connected to screens, enabling passengers to see what he is writing and to come and share their stories. He will meet travellers from around the world, and will be given unprecedented access to wander the airport and speak with everyone from window cleaners and baggage handlers to air traffic controllers and cabin crew. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, de Botton will produce an extraordinary meditation upon the nature of place, time, and our daily lives. He will explore the magical and the mundane, personal and collective experiences and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious site. Like all airports, Heathrow (the 15th century village of Heath Row lies beneath the short stay car park) is a 'non-place' that we by definition want to leave, but it also provides a window into many worlds - through the thousands of people it dispatches every day. A Week at the Airport is sure to delight de Botton's large following, and anyone interested in the stories behind the way we live.

In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unresticted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. BAsed on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explored the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious 'non-place', qhich by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, 'air-side' and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think. £8.99

If you were asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that captures all the themes running through the modern world - from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel - then you would almost certainly have to head to an airport. Airports, in all their turmoil, interest and beauty, are the imaginative centres of our civilisation. 'I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life' Jan Morris 'De Botton's gift is to prompt us to think about how we live and how we might change things' The Times

Alain de Botton is the bestselling author of books on the philosophy of subjects including love, travel and status. He is the founder of The School of Life, an organisation in London for whom he has conducted a guided weekend tour of Heathrow airport.