best books may

From tales of gentrification-mad Brooklyn to a novel about the final days of Ceausescu, here’s what we’re reading this month.

Taking the prize for creepiest read during an election year is Lydia Millet’s literary thriller Sweet Lamb of Heaven (Norton), in which a young mother who hears voices is blackmailed by her ultraconservative politician husband (think Ted Cruz, but truly sociopathic).

To be gifted and unstable is a double bind, one that Adam Haslett’s second novel, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown), traces with expansiveness and precision in two generations of an Anglo-American family . On the seductive effects of Klonopin: “Here was the world unfettered by dread . . . the present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.”

Two couples, former Oberlin bandmates in the 1980s, come of 21st-century middle age in Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers (Riverhead), which nails the Brooklyn mise-en-scène: $2 million Victorians, a kombucha-brewing enterprise gone awry.

Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller. A mutilated fox-fur rug becomes the central metaphor in the Nobel Prize winner’s newly translated 1992 novel, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (Metropolitan), which recalls Cold War Romania in the story of four friends, one of whom is a spy for the secret police.

Musicians today might fear a bad review in The New York Times; in Dmitri Shostakovich’s time, a bad review in Pravda was tantamount to a death threat. Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (Knopf)—his first novel since his Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending—conjures the Russian composer’s life under Stalin’s Great Terror, an unromanticized study of creativity under tyranny’s thumb.

And Mark Haddon’s short-story collection, The Pier Falls (Doubleday), reveals the darker side of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author, in which imaginary what-ifs and chance encounters speak to rougher-edged enchantments, including a princess who is abandoned by her prince: “She realized that there were many worlds beyond this world and that her own was very small indeed.”