Character guides · spoiler-light

Characters in The Age of Names

In a novel where power follows names, a character guide is not a list of stats. Each of these pages covers who someone is when the book opens, and stops before the turns that ought to arrive as you read.

The book's recurring question is what remains of a person when grief, prophecy, empire, family, or love tries to become their only name. That makes description itself a live problem: each of these characters is offered several true descriptions, and the danger begins when one of them claims to be the whole person.

Winter Garcia — Eighteen, a newspaper copy boy on Mott Street, and the person whose school ledger stops admitting he exists.
Belgrad — An Ancient king bound to Winter through an emergency merging and an imperfect covenant. Prisoner, king, weapon, mistake.
Elena “Nan” Ferraro — Winter's grandmother, and keeper of the food, salt, thresholds, complaint, and memory that become real defence.
Mateo and Isabel Garcia — Winter's parents: an attorney who trusts forms and witnesses, and a dressmaker who finds the human entrance procedure overlooks.
Eprius and Cadence — Two Guardians watching Winter for his own good, and the moment witness turns into surveillance.
Lord Krasus — Commander of the North American Keep, once Belgrad's apprentice. His danger is turning people into terrain.
Angela Richards — A New York policewoman who separates what happened, what she was told, and what she can prove.
Pete and Dave — A radio mind fast enough to interrupt fear, and a teacher who will not call a lesson finished until someone else can teach it.

More of the cast — Fallex and Maliki among them — appears in the novel's own Cast of Characters, printed in the book.

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Meet them from the first page.

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