“Honey, if you can hear me, send me a little advice now. I’m fifty-two. I could live to be eighty or ninety and what am I going to do with myself for all those decades? No one wants to hire a fifty-two-year-old ex-editor, and I’m not sure I want to go back to working full-time in any case. I’d give anything to be able to sit down with a glass of wine and talk this over with you. I’m adrift. Help me out if you can.”

The world is too much for Otto Ringling. Despondent after the passing of his beloved wife, Jeannie, he suddenly finds himself unemployed, mourning the loss of his dog, experiencing the pangs of empty nest syndrome, and entirely consumed by “sadness on all fronts.” At a spiritual crossroads (“I wasn’t sure, any longer, that there were answers to the big questions: why we suffer, why we die, why we’re born in the first place”), the main character in Roland Merullo’s much-anticipated follow-up to BREAKFAST WITH BUDDHA leaves the harsh, all-too-real, sophisticated world of New York City for a three-week hiatus in his parents’ North Dakota farmhouse.

"Merullo’s soulful, deeply satisfying novel takes readers on a spirited madcap adventure. All roads lead to real-time discoveries, and all characters have rich interior lives."

Attempting to free himself from an inner “circus of despair,” Otto luxuriates in the blanket of “beautiful silence” and the “occasional bursts of song from a meadowlark” in the high-plains August heat. But there is no rest for the weary. When his eccentric sister Seese (aka Cecilia) announces with great urgency that she’s had a dream, Otto knows “by virtue of some mysterious sibling intuition" that he has entered risky territory.

Seese’s vision requires Otto to join her Russian monk husband, Volya Rinpoche, on a sojourn to a mountainous region to find a person who is going to help her seven-year-old daughter save the world. Although convinced that mountains have nothing to offer but inadequate Internet reception and the absence of pad thai, Otto, eager for a change in fate, decides to embark on the trip in search of healing, enlightenment or, as his inner cynic grumbles, God knows what.

What follows is an entirely delightful cross-country excursion across North Dakota and South Dakota, through vast rolling stretches of dry, dusty lands, past Sioux and Apache reservations, the mounds and swales of Nebraska’s sandhills, the bleak featureless landscape of Northwestern Colorado, beyond the jagged, majestic Rockies, along the serpentine roads of Utah Route 128 to Bryce Canyon’s Zion National Park to the glittery themed hotels on Las Vegas’s Strip. All the while, throughout the story, Rinpoche encourages Otto to carve out time to meditate and provides reassuringly sage bits of advice: “Soak the love on us in this world spinning and let us go the road we supposed to go.”

Merullo’s soulful, deeply satisfying novel takes readers on a spirited madcap adventure. All roads lead to real-time discoveries, and all characters have rich interior lives.