Cardinal in the Snow
Part 3 of the Prayers In The Air series
Book Three of the Prayers in the Air series by Dennis Santaniello.Winter, 1917. A South Tyrolean 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. But 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 a tense historical novel about identity and survival. It continues Prayers in the Air and reads well on its own. Dennis Santaniello is a New Jersey–born author who writes novels, screenplays, and essays. His work moves between historical fiction and nonfiction, with a steady interest in how people carry memory, loyalty, and damage through time. His books include Sergei and Hans, a World War I novel set on the Eastern Front, The Conquistadors Trilogy about the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the nonfiction series The Fruits of History, and Dennis At The Movies. He publishes independently and approaches his work with patience, curiosity, and a voice shaped by long years of writing and revisiting the same questions from different angles.