Cardinal In The Snow

South Tyrol, winter 1917. The village keeps changing hands.

Ten-year-old Fernando changes with it. Fernando when the Italians hold the square. Ferdinand when the Austrians take it back. His father times the flag changes. Forty-three seconds. Thirty-eight. Twenty-eight.

The café survives by serving both sides. The regulars are disappearing. The flag changes are getting faster. And Fernando is starting to forget which version of himself is real.

Then an American walks in.

And this time, even switching sides won't be enough to save them.

Cardinal in the Snow is the third book in the Prayers in the Air series—a tense, compressed historical novel about identity, survival, and a boy caught between empires. It reads well on its own.