"More science fiction than a detective novel, not the usual cynical detective novel, but the big story of the early twentieth century throughout Europe, with the streets and brothels of Budapest at its center.... A fascinating mosaic of the underworld of Budapest, as well as a fantastic heist story." International Noir Fiction

Ranging through a history of changing empires, monarchies, countries, regimes, religions, down to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names, Hungary is always there, through the Millennium celebrations over a century ago, amid the exhausted last days of communism, and even under today's "illiberal democracy."

Lengyel is a Hungarian writer whose career spanned the communist era. He was a translator, a playwright and went to Havana for a while as a university lecturer. He became best known in Hungary in the late 1960s and 1970s as a science fiction writer (as many writers in dictatorships know, when it’s problematic to write about the world you live in simply get into a spaceship and set your novels in galaxies far, far away). In 1988 he took a break from sci-fi to write a crime novel. Cobblestone may start with a jewel heist in 1896 Budapest but it roams far and wide through the city’s history—collapsing empires and monarchies, different regimes, religious tensions, and up to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names under communism as much of old Budapest was threatened with destruction. Cobblestone is the entire history of twentieth century Budapest in one gloriously sprawling, crime novel.