Delirium characters

Also known as Magdalena Ella Haloway

Appears from the start

A seventeen-year-old girl living in Portland, Maine, in a United States where love has been classified as a disease, amor deliria nervosa, and everyone is given a procedure at eighteen that removes the capacity for it. She is counting the days until her own procedure and wants it: her family carries a history of the disease, her mother died of it, and Lena has spent her whole life being careful, obedient and unremarkable so that nobody will look too closely at her. She runs, she does well enough at school, she does what her aunt tells her, and she has never once wanted anything she was not supposed to want.

Appears from the start

Lena's best friend since childhood, from a wealthy family and bound for one of the best matches in the city. Tall, blonde and unafraid in a way Lena is not, she asks out loud the questions Lena will not let herself think, and she has begun going to places and listening to music that are not permitted.

Appears from the start

Lena's aunt, who took her in after her mother's death and raised her alongside her own children. Cured, orderly and anxious about appearances, she has never let Lena forget that the family is watched more closely than most.

Appears from the start

Lena's uncle, a quiet cured man who runs a small shop and leaves the running of the household to his wife.

First appears in chapter 5

A young man Lena notices watching her from the observation deck during her evaluation, and who does something no one in a cured city does: he laughs, and he catches her eye on purpose. He turns out to work as a guard at the laboratories, and to have a procedure scar behind his ear like everyone else his age.

First appears in chapter 2

Lena's older cousin, close to her own age and not close to her at all: she reports what Lena does and is impatient for her own procedure.

First appears in chapter 2

Lena's small cousin, six years old, who does not speak. The household treats her as slow and largely ignores her. Lena is the only person who sits with her, and suspects there is far more going on behind her silence than anyone credits.

First appears in chapter 3

Lena's older sister, cured, married to her assigned match and living a quiet, settled, entirely correct life. Lena remembers her from before the procedure and finds the difference difficult to look at.

First appears in chapter 3

Lena's mother, who the procedure never took with, and who died when Lena was six. What happened is the shame the family lives under and the reason Lena is considered a risk.

First appears in chapter 15

A girl from Lena's school who is caught somewhere she should not have been, with a boy she should not have been with. What happens to her afterward is a lesson the city intends everybody to learn.

First appears in chapter 15

The boy assigned to Lena as her match: a stranger she has met once, whom she is expected to marry after her procedure and with whom she is expected to have a set number of children.