Ryan Byrnes Books

After an autistic man ends up in the trenches of World War I, a nun-turned-journalist dances with treason to care for him, and a candy store clerk posing as Santa Claus risks everything to bring him home. Luther Baker is a kind-hearted autistic man with a savant's knack for making chocolate truffles. His entire life, he has worked in his family's sweet shop alongside his single mother--until he is illegally thrust into the horrors of World War I. Two people who risk everything to save him, his brother and an aspiring journalist, finally cross paths with Luther on Christmas Day, 1914, when they witness one of the most uplifting spectacles of nonviolence in history, when thousands of soldiers broke orders and refused to kill dudring the Christmas Truce of 1914.

My Dear Antonio is inspired by the love story of Byrnes' great-grandparents-- children of the Sicilian diaspora separated from their families on the Mediterranean coast who loved, parted, and found each other again seven years and three continents later. In 1912, after barely surviving a near-fatal asthma attack, Sicilian emigrant Anna DiNicola leaves her family in Brooklyn to seek a cure in the balmy climate of Tunisia. Detesting her dependency on her aunt, she works towards independence by weaving wedding shawls for the Sephardic Jewish community. However, her apprenticeship comes with an expectation that she will marry her mentor's son while her heart lies with someone else. Antonio Orlando, a Sicilian native, dreams of working in his father's barber shop, but mafia force his father to close the shop and emigrate to America, abandoning Antonio. To avoid the mafia, Antonio moves in with his uncle, a barber in Tunisia. He befriends Anna during her regular haircuts and begins to wonder if home is not a place but rather a person. When he accepts a betrothal to his cousin that would enable him to return to Sicily, Antonio must choose between his duty to family and his heart.