He's written about long trips to Ikea, concerts in Central Park and celebrities such as Heath Ledger and Stephen Colbert.

But his latest work allows him to weave together his experiences growing up in Northeast Georgia with love for his part-time hometown, Atlanta.

On Thursday, Tray Butler's new book, "Moon Atlanta," hits bookstores, and the Gainesville High School graduate, who today calls both London and Atlanta his home, says the guidebook is a labor of love.

"It was a huge labor of love," he said in a recent phone interview from London. "The Moon handbooks, they really try to hire a writer who knows the city backwards and forwards, and they place the entire project in that one writer's hands."

Butler not only did all the researching and writing for the book, which covers the city and its surrounding in-town residential areas, but he also took photos and choreographed graphics. The plan, he said, is to keep most of the book's content updated on a corresponding Web site and then publish a new version every two years.

Butler will be in Atlanta on Thursday signing copies of the new book.

The book strives to be a "strategic" guide to the city, said Butler, who is a graduate of the University of Georgia and cut his journalistic teeth at Creative Loafing before working as a writer in New York City and later freelancing. He has been a freelance writer and illustrator for the past two years.

"There's plenty of travel books out there about the city that will list every single restaurant or every single hotel," he said. "This book is a little different because, yeah, we want to be comprehensive, but they really want that insider perspective of, ‘What do I really want to see?'"

Often, he said, visitors come to Atlanta and never leave the central downtown core.

Of the 37 million visitors who visit Atlanta each year, many come for conventions. That means their world usually revolves around the attractions in the area of the Georgia World Congress Center - the World of Coca-Cola, CNN and Centennial Park, for example.

But there is so much more to the city, Butler said. Take areas like Virginia Highland or Midtown, where distinct homes, restaurants and shops make each area unique.

"You really don't get a sense of Atlanta if you've never seen Midtown, or you've gone to some restaurant in Virginia Highlands, or you've driven around Buckhead some," he said. "There's so much more to the city than that really tiny area downtown, which is really kind of boring after dark anyway."

Butler's time in Atlanta working for Creative Loafing not only gave him a unique perspective of the city, but it also allowed him to expand his writing subjects, too.

He covered different aspects of the arts scene there, interviewing celebrities, writing stories about pop culture and even contributing illustrations to the magazine.

"I loved it," he said. "I mean, talk about learning on the job. Week to week I didn't know what I was going to get."

He then moved to New York, where he interviewed celebrities like Ledger, Anne Hathaway and Elvira (the mistress of the dark).

"Just the most bizarre collection (of celebrities)," Butler said. "My favorite celebrities are the ones who just act like, ‘I have a little bit of fame but I'm more interested in my art than I am about my CELEBRITY status.'"

But because he's a Georgia boy at heart, Butler said all the traveling and living abroad can't replace a little Southern drawl and a glass of sweet tea.

And in London, you'd be surprised how difficult it is to make a decent glass of sweet tea, he said.

"The tea here is amazing, but it is absolutely not the same as American tea. And you can try to make sweet tea out of the tea that's sold here, and it ain't the same," he said. "I'm not a tea expert, but I'm here to tell you, it just doesn't work."