Sergei and Hans

Christmas Eve, 1914. The Carpathian Mountains.

A Russian prisoner and a German guard spend one night in a storage cabin on the Eastern Front. By morning, something between them has changed—and neither one can undo it.

Sergei is a musician. Before the war, he played in orchards and grand ballrooms. Now he survives on memories of a woman named Anya and the life he lost. His rain-soaked journal is the only proof that life existed at all.

Hans is the guard in the tower. A seminary student who never imagined he'd hold a rifle pointed at other men. When he finds Sergei's journal thrown into a fire, he reads it cover to cover—peaches, cherry trees, the small human moments that make a life worth living.

On Christmas Eve, in firelight, they share schnapps and soup. For a few hours, they stop being prisoner and guard. They become two men who recognize each other across a divide that was supposed to keep them worlds apart.

Sergei and Hans is the first book in the Prayers in the Air series—literary World War I fiction about the quiet, impossible moments of connection that survive when everything else burns away. Each book stands alone.