"This is an ode to longing. It is through longing that we often encounter unknown depths in our inner landscape." So writes Tony Bernardi, a little-known sage who gives us here a series of dialogues that chronicle a passage through loneliness and desolation into unexpected wisdom. In 18 dialogues, Bernardi's narrator encounters Grief, Faith, Love, Death, Work and other enduring characters from the road that all people walk. Personified in these dialogues, they lead us on a memorable and necessary journey. In a very different work made nearly two centuries ago, Dickens gave us Scrooge's...