This newly translated 1992 novel from the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, set during the twilight of Romania’s Ceausescu regime, makes vivid the persecution Müller and others suffered. (She emigrated in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.) Adina, a teacher, a musician named Paul and lovers Clara and Pavel seem to be close friends. But one is an informer, reporting to the secret police. When Adina finds the tail razored off her fox fur rug, and later a foreleg, she knows someone has been in her apartment and that she is being watched. “The breath of fear looms in the park, it slows the mind and makes people see their lives in everything others say and do,” Müller writes. She uses the distinctive language honoured by the Nobel Committee for its “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" to give a powerful sense of the toxic atmosphere of a totalitarian regime, where the dictator’s eye “stares out of the newspaper every day, peering into the country.” (Credit: Metropolitan)