Chaplin and Company

British author Fellowes’s quirky debut centers around eccentric but plucky Odeline Milk, who at 18, following the death of her mother, Eunice, decides to leave the suffocating London homestead that’s stifling her “artistic temperament.” Odeline uses money from her mother’s life insurance policy to purchase Chaplin and Company, a faded but well-appointed canal houseboat, hoping to thereby jump-start the new life she’s long desired, which involves becoming a professional mime and reuniting with her estranged father, Odelin, a clown in a travelling circus. Odeline’s colorful odyssey is complicated by a gaggle of misfits just as eccentric as she is. They include shady Albanian thug Zjelko; hard-drinking canal warden John Kettle; Ridley, a heavily-tattooed canal neighbor; and kindhearted Vera Novak, a waitress at Zjelko’s cafe, whose compassion eases Odeline into some difficult life lessons. The author masterfully threads the boat’s tangled history into her heroine’s own melodramatic story, which, once Fellowes finds her narrative footing, features a panoply of unlikely escapades and underworld intrigue. Fellowes’s first novel is amiably entertaining and, though it is light in tone, it artfully explores themes of friendship, independence, and growing pains with depth, compassion, and plenty of good cheer. Agent: Alice Lutyens, Curtis Brown. (June)