Stormbreaker characters

Appears from the start

A fourteen-year-old Londoner, orphaned as a baby and raised by his uncle Ian. He attends Brookland School and seems ordinary to his classmates, but a childhood of unusual holidays has left him fluent in several languages and trained in climbing, diving and karate without his ever being told why. Self-contained and stubborn, he refuses to accept the official account of his uncle's death and starts asking questions nobody wants him to ask.

Appears from the start

Alex's uncle and legal guardian, who took him in as an infant after his parents died. A private, undemonstrative man who worked for a bank and travelled abroad constantly, he taught Alex an odd assortment of skills and told him almost nothing about himself. His death in a car accident is the news that opens the book.

Appears from the start

The American housekeeper of the Rider household, in her late twenties. She came to London to study law, took a summer job looking after Alex and never left. Warm, direct and protective, she is the nearest thing Alex has to family, and her right to stay in Britain depends on the household continuing.

First appears in chapter 3

The head of the Special Operations division of MI6, which does its business behind the front of the Royal & General Bank. Grey, precise and almost entirely unreadable, he weighs people strictly by their usefulness and is untroubled by the idea of sending a schoolboy into the field.

First appears in chapter 3

Blunt's deputy at Special Operations, rarely seen without a peppermint. Her manner is gentler than her chief's and she shows flickers of conscience about what the department is doing, but she signs off on the same decisions.

First appears in chapter 5

The leader of the four-man Special Air Service unit Alex is attached to during selection training in the Brecon Beacons. Hard, disciplined and openly contemptuous of having a boy dumped on his team, he makes the fortnight as difficult for Alex as he can.

First appears in chapter 6

MI6's gadget-maker, a large, cheerful man who takes obvious delight in his work. Because Alex must pass as an ordinary teenager, he builds his equipment into things a boy would plausibly carry, and he is one of the few people at the department who treats Alex kindly.

First appears in chapter 7

A self-made billionaire, born in poverty in Beirut and now the owner of a computer empire based in Cornwall. His Stormbreaker machine is the most advanced computer in the world, and he is giving one to every school in Britain, a gesture that has made him a national figure. Small, watchful and charming in public, he is short-tempered with his own staff, and MI6 want to know why an agent investigating him ended up dead.

First appears in chapter 7

Sayle's butler and personal bodyguard, a former circus knife-thrower whose face was ruined in an accident with his own act. The injury has left him with a permanent rictus and speech nobody but his employer can interpret. He is still lethally accurate with a blade.

First appears in chapter 7

Sayle's assistant and the manager of his plant, a brisk, humourless woman with a heavy accent who conducts Alex's tour and decides where he is and is not allowed to go.

First appears in chapter 11

A young Russian contract killer, quiet, polite and entirely without theatre, who arrives at Sayle's estate by night with cargo nobody is meant to see. He works for people whose names are never spoken and treats killing as a trade like any other.