City of Women Audiobook

Quotes

• “Gillham’s excellent new novel…is built on one of the most extraordinary and faithful recreations of a time in history—Berlin in World War II—that I’ve ever read.”

  — Alan Furst, New York Times bestselling author

• “In this moving and masterful debut, David Gillham brings war-torn Berlin to life and reveals the extraordinary mettle of women tested to their limits and beyond. Powerful and piercingly real. You won’t soon forget these characters.”

  — Paula McLain, New York Times bestselling author

• “City of Women is a big, brilliant, passionate book, a masterful evocation of Hitler’s Berlin in all its claustrophobia, duplicity, and fear. This is a thriller of searing intensity…I found it utterly compelling.”

  — Margaret Leroy, New York Times bestselling author

• “The author’s impeccable research, realism, and tenderness are important. They make fiction seem like a viable tool for reminding ourselves of history as it truly happened—and not simply as it affects us.”

  — USA Today

• “In this stunning debut about the battle between good and evil, Gillham puts a fresh spin on the horrors of WWII by focusing on civilian German women to reveal that, amid the many adherents of the party line there were a handful of unsung heroes…Gillham’s transcendent prose…powerfully drawn characters, and the multilayered dilemmas make his first literary effort a powerful revelation.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “City of Women is extraordinary for what it does not do. It does not detail the events or imagined conversations of Hitler’s Reich, and it has not a single scene of life in the death camps. Instead, it chronicles—in detail so specific that it’s mesmerizing, but not so obviously researched as to be annoying—life for ‘ordinary’ Berliners at a time that was anything but. Through Heroine Sigrid Schröder, a German wife drawn into an affair with a Jew, Gillham shows us a world in which not all Germans are bad, not all Jews are victims, and loyalty is a fiction, the grimmest of fairy tales.”

  — Amazon.com, editorial review

• “Sometimes it seems as if novels about WWII are a dime a dozen. David Gillham’s City of Women, narrated by Suzanne Bertish, manages to find a fresh angle on the much-told story…Bertish narrates ably, making Sigrid come alive to the point that her large character arc seems quite believable.”

  — AudioFile

• “Gillham tells a gripping story centered around strong and remarkable characters…Scenes of wartime Berlin are powerfully described, and the lot of the ordinary citizen is artfully shown. Gillham’s romantic and suspenseful novel, commandingly written and believable, should be widely read.”

  — Booklist

• “Gillham’s novel—vividly cinematic yet subtle and full of moral ambiguity, not to mention riveting characters—is as impossible to put down as it is to forget.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “Haunting and sensual, City of Women is a story of survival, of the unfathomable choices made and consequences suffered by those pushed to the brink. David Gillham has depicted a little-known aspect of the war with humanity and grace.” 

  — Pam Jenoff, author of The Things We Cherished