by Maya Bermstein
Once you pick up City of Women by David Gillham (Putnam/Amy Einhorn, $25.95), it is difficult to put down. As you follow the protagonist, Sigrid Schroder, down the first pages of the novel, through her walk to the cinema on the drab and increasingly dangerous streets of Berlin in 1943, you enter the entangled web of memory, reality, and terrifying choices that comprise her life.