An architect in an unnamed city considers his life, his work, and the many-layered history of the city he and his family--architects all--have contributed to building. In the days after World War II--during which American bombers destroyed much of what his father built--he becomes a Stalinist planner and realizes that the power of the nobility, the wealthy and the bourgeois has been usurped by technocrats. Vanished by those technocrats into the communist underworld of torture and imprisonment, he is eventually released into a post-Stalinist world and becomes the chief builder in a provincial town. Told with wit and elegance by one of Hungary's greatest writers, The City Builder is one of the most important and impassioned books about the indignities of living in--and contributing to--a cruelly depersonalized society.

George Konrad, a former president of International PEN and the Academy of Arts in Berlin, is the author of "The Case Worker" and "The Invisible Voice", among many other widely translated books. He lives in Budapest. Michael Henry Heim, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, has translated works by Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, and Bohumil Hrabal, among others.