A novel construction of lattices is proposed. This construction can be thought of as a special class of Construction A from codes over finite rings that can be represented as the Cartesian product of L linear codes over F p1 , . . . , F pL , respectively, and hence is referred to as Construction π A . The existence of a sequence of such lattices that is good for channel coding (i.e., Poltyrev-limit achieving) under multistage decoding is shown. A new family of multilevel nested lattice codes based on Construction π A lattices is proposed and its achievable rate for the additive white Gaussian channel is analyzed. A generalization named Construction π D is also investigated which subsumes Construction A with codes over prime fields, Construction D, and Construction π A as special cases.