The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Scratched into the floor of a closet, in a hand its new occupant will never match to a face, is a line of schoolroom Latin a woman left there before her: nolite te bastardes carborundorum, don't let the bastards grind you down. The closet belongs to a Commander in the Republic of Gilead, and the woman who finds it is called Offred because she now belongs to a man named Fred, forbidden to hold money, forbidden even to read the words she has just discovered. Margaret Atwood built Gilead out of the historical record and invented none of its cruelties, and that is the source of its particular dread: you cannot find the moment where this becomes impossible, only the moments where it became convenient. Offred hoards memory the way the starving hoard bread, her stolen name, her daughter's weight in her arms, her husband's face going soft at the edges. Read it once and you will never again trust that the ground beneath an ordinary life is solid.