Joe Rose
Joe Rose is a middle-aged successful science journalist living with his long-time girlfriend Clarissa Rose in London. He considers himself unattractive and marvels that Clarissa loves him. He prizes rationality highly and secretly regrets not entering into the academic scientific world. He is the object of Jed Parry's obsessions.
Clarissa Mellon
Clarissa is Joe's girlfriend and an English professor who specializes in the Romantic poet John Keats. She loves children and is secretly devastated that she is barren. She loves Joe's rationality but she is ruled by her emotions and interpretive intuition.
Jed Parry
Jed Parry is a lonely young man who lives by himself in a large house he inherited from his mother. He is devoutly Christian, although he doesn't follow any specific sect. He suffers from de Clérambault’s syndrome, a disease that makes you convinced that a stranger is in love with you. The object of his obsession is Joe Rose, whom he stalks.
John Logan
John Logan is a doctor with a wife and two children in Oxford. He dies trying to save a little boy in a ballooning accident at the beginning of the novel, and his senseless death haunts many of the characters for the rest of the novel. He is a courageous yet cautious man.
Jean Logan
Jean Logan is John Logan's wife and a history professor at Oxford. She struggles with John's death, convincing herself that he was having an affair.
Rachael Logan
Rachael Logan is the precocious ten-year-old daughter of John and Jean Logan. She misses her father and clings to Joe as a result.
Leo Logan
Leo Logan is the eight-year-old son of John and Jean Logan.
Joseph Lacey
Joseph Lacey is a sixty-three-year-old farm laborer who tries to help at the balloon accident and helps Joe find the others who were in John Logan's car.
Toby Greene
Toby Greene is a fifty-eight-year-old farm laborer who tries to help during the accident and breaks him arm. He lives with his mother.
James Gadd
James Gadd is the irresponsible middle-aged balloonist responsible for the accident. His grandson is the boy in the balloon.
Harry Gadd
Harry Gadd is the boy trapped in the balloon at the beginning of the story, too shocked to help himself.
Luke Mellon
Luke Mellon is Clarissa's brother who is in the process of leaving his wife for an actress.
Professor Jocelyn Kale
Professor Kale is a preeminent geneticist and Clarissa's godfather. He invites Joe and Clarissa to lunch on her birthday, the location of the shooting.
Officer Linley
Linley is the tired, overworked police officer to whom Joe brings his complaint about Parry, right before Clarissa's birthday lunch.
Colin Tapp
Colin Tapp is the middle-aged undersecretary of state at the Department of Trade and Industry. He is sitting next to Joe's party at lunch with his daughter and father when he is accidentally shot by Parry's hitmen.
Detective Wallace
Detective Wallace is a young police officer investigating the lunchtime shooting. He doesn't believe Joe's story that he is the real target.
Johnny B. Well
Johnny B. Well is Joe's old drug dealer, who hasn't changed since the mid-seventies. He is constantly high and fairly passive.
Steve
Steve is one of the hippies from whom Joe tries to buy a gun. He has a pointy, hennaed mustache and a bald head, something that Joe finds ridiculous.
Xan
Xan is one of the hippies from whom Joe tries to buy a gun. He believes in holistic medicine and has muscular arms.
Daisy
Daisy is one of the hippies from whom Joe tries to buy a gun. She gives off an air of disappointment and failure and she has to take care of the other two hippies.
Bonny Deedes
Bonny is a blonde bombshell and the student and girlfriend of James Reid. She is quiet and possibly unintelligent. It is her scarf that Jean finds in John's car.
James Reid
James is the Euler Professor of Logic and the boyfriend of Bonny Deedes. Although they witness the accident, they don't come forward because they don't want to reveal their affair. He is intelligent, but potentially foolish in love.
Wenn and Camia
Wenn and Camia are the authors of the case study in the first appendix. Their names are an anagram of Ian McEwan, the author of Enduring Love.
