The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

A bachelor of forty inherits a baronetcy and decides to write a philosophical treatise on the ordering of life — at which point a runaway Syrian girl arrives on his doorstep and life declines to be ordered. Locke was born in Barbados and kept an architect's ledgers for a decade before his fiction took hold; his speciality was the charming vagabond who ruins a sensible man's plans.