The Stepford Wives (1972)

Joanna Eberhart moves to a town whose immaculate domestic life begins to look unnervingly uniform. Levin turns the ideal of the perfect wife into a tightly controlled speculative horror story, keeping the social pressure visible before explaining its machinery. The short novel is useful here for its concentration: almost every encounter sharpens the same question about whose preferences are allowed to define another person's life. Avoid summaries that explain the town's secret.