In a city where it always rains some people have names while others have only numbers. By means of plastic surgery all are made alike, both outwardly and inwardly. Once they commit an error they are punished with Departure.

The Face Maker and the Muse is an anti-utopia about the society where work is a giant machinery mutilating human beings, where everybody desperately tries to climb the social ladder, but the success depends on the degree of the person's likeness to the Model Face, created by the Great Face-Maker. From time to time the Model is changed, overturning the entire social structure.

Written in 1977-78 the novel predicted as it were the Gorbachev era and the subsequent social turmoil. In a way it is a philosophical enquiry into the mental anguish of a spiritually aware person in an alien society.

But above all is hovers tenderness into an unbelievable need of two human beings for each other: love is an outlet and a promise of renovation and rebirth of the human spirit after all the martyrdom of this century.