Lair of Dreams characters

Also known as The Sweetheart Seer

First appears in chapter 6

Now the most famous Diviner in America, with a nightly radio programme on which listeners hand over their belongings and she tells them their secrets on the air. She has left her uncle's museum for a hotel suite and lives on late nights, cocktails, and press clippings. The readings cost her more than she admits, and beneath the performance she is lonely and increasingly aware that being a public curiosity is not the same as being safe.

First appears in chapter 3

A seventeen-year-old from Chinatown, daughter of a Chinese father and an Irish mother, who can walk inside other people's dreams and, unlike any other dream walker, find and speak with the dead there. Families pay her to carry messages to and from relatives they have lost. An illness left her legs damaged, and she moves on braces and canes through a neighbourhood that offers her pity she does not want. Exacting, blunt, impatient with sentiment, she means to study science.

First appears in chapter 7

Theta's closest friend, a Follies rehearsal pianist and songwriter, and a dream walker: he can enter other people's dreams and hold on to them if he keeps something of the sleeper's close. Night after night he uses the gift to search the dream world for Louis, the boy he loved in Louisiana and was made to leave behind. He times every walk with a clock, because a dream walker who stays too long may not wake up.

First appears in chapter 6

The pickpocket who can keep people from seeing him for a few seconds at a time, still attached to the museum and still hunting for his mother, who was taken by government men when he was a boy. Fast-talking, chronically broke, and better at loyalty than he lets on, he keeps finding reasons to stay close to Evie.

First appears in chapter 18

A young woman Ling and Henry meet inside the dream world, who says she is a picture bride crossing the ocean to marry a man she has never seen. Delighted by everything, hungry for company, and far more skilled at shaping dreams than either of them, she can build whole landscapes out of nothing and offers to teach them how.

First appears in chapter 9

A Follies star with her name on the bill, in a relationship with Memphis that both of them keep hidden. She can call fire when she is frightened or furious, a gift she does not want, and she lives with the fear that the husband she fled in Kansas will one day find her in New York.

First appears in chapter 9

The Harlem poet whose healing gift has returned, in love with Theta and writing more seriously than ever. Every person he heals takes something out of him, and he is still running numbers to keep the household going while trying to work out what his ability is actually for.

First appears in chapter 11

Memphis's younger brother, whose visions have grown stronger and more frequent since Sister Walker's tests were stopped. He resents being treated as a child and is drawn to anyone who takes his gift seriously.

First appears in chapter 9

An old blind singer newly arrived in Harlem, taken in by the church and quickly made welcome, who plays guitar and takes a friendly interest in the Campbell boys. He was blinded years ago in circumstances he will not discuss, and he is looking for a way to see again.

First appears in chapter 12

Will's assistant, still living at the museum and still dependent on the daily serum that keeps him alive and unnaturally strong. Since Evie left he has been left holding the museum together, and his feelings for her, and Mabel's feelings for him, remain unresolved.

First appears in chapter 12

Evie's oldest friend, tired of being the sensible one and of watching Evie's fame from the sidelines. Raised by campaigners, she is beginning to look for a cause of her own and for someone who sees her as more than a reliable friend.

First appears in chapter 12

Evie's uncle, still curating the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, which is short of money and shorter of visitors. He and Evie have barely spoken since she went public, and he is quietly gathering everything he can find about Diviners appearing across the country.

First appears in chapter 8

A fiddle player from the Louisiana bayou, the boy Henry loved before his father broke up the pair and Henry ran away to New York. Henry has no address for him and no way to reach him except by looking for him in dreams.

First appears in chapter 24

The Harlem woman who tested Isaiah and shares Will's history. Careful, principled, and carrying a great deal she has never said aloud, she knows more about where Diviners come from than she will admit to any of them.

First appears in chapter 29

The most celebrated man in America: inventor, industrialist, and self-appointed prophet of a scientific future, preparing an exhibition to show the country what he has built. He publicly dismisses Diviners as superstition, and he paid for the treatment that keeps Jericho alive.

First appears in chapter 68

Two government men in dark suits who appear whenever the subject of Diviners or of a wartime programme comes up: polite, patient, untroubled by locked doors, and interested in everyone Evie knows.