Tony: Antonia Fremont, or Tony, has an intellectual and pragmatic personality, though she has a highly imaginative inner life. She works as a professor of history at the
University of Toronto, with war as her area of specialty. The daughter of an English
war bride and a Canadian serviceman, she was abandoned by her mother at ten years old, and her father died by suicide after her high school graduation. Tony is left-handed and has a propensity for writing words backwards; in this way, she gives herself an alter ego, Ynot Tnomerf, whom she imagines as a barbarian chief in contrast to her own short, slight figure. She has no children and has been romantically involved with only one man in her life, her husband West.
Charis: Charis, who does not have a surname given in the novel, is profoundly spiritual and idealistic to the point of naivete. Born under the name Karen, she was raised by a single mother who claimed to be a war widow; she spent a formative summer with her eccentric grandmother, from whom she learned much of her spirituality. When her mother was institutionalized, Karen was sent to live with her aunt and sexually abusive uncle. She changed her name to Charis and adopted a bohemian lifestyle, eventually falling in with a group of anti-war activists. In the narrative present of the novel, she lives on the Toronto Islands and works at a
New Age shop. Charis has one child, a nineteen-year-old daughter named Augusta. After Augusta’s father Billy leaves, she abandons her free-love beliefs and avoids sex.
Roz: Rosalind Andrews (nee Greenwood or Grunwald) is outspoken, worldly, and maternal, though insecure about her physical appearance. She spent the first years of her childhood in her Catholic mother’s boarding house; in her early teens, her Jewish father returned from Europe, having made his fortune smuggling people and property out of
Nazi Germany. Roz began her career as a successful venture capitalist working in her father’s business and supports feminist causes. She is devoted to and protective of her three children, the twenty-two-year-old Larry and the fifteen-year-old twins Erin and Paula. Prior to their separation and his death, she was deeply in love with her husband Mitch and routinely forgave him for his chronic adultery.
Zenia: Zenia, whose surname is also not given, is a beautiful and manipulative woman of roughly the same age as the other three; almost nothing else is known of her, and possibly Zenia is not her real name. She provides a different account of her origins and motivations to each of the other women, tailored to most appeal to their sympathies, interests, and fears. To Tony, the historian with a macabre interest in war, she says her aristocratic family were dispossessed by the
Russian Revolution and she was a child prostitute; to the romantic and bohemian Charis, she claims her mother was a
Roma woman stoned to death by ignorant villagers; she tells Roz that she was a Jewish child smuggled out of Germany with assistance from Roz’s adored father. When she returns in 1990, she tells Tony she has information about the
Supergun affair, Charis that she has
AIDS, and Roz that she is buying drugs from Roz’s son Larry, all of which proves to be false. She also tells Tony that she faked her death in Lebanon to conceal her
black market arms trading, Charis that Billy left because he became an informant for the
FBI, and Roz that Mitch tried to kill her when she attempted to leave him, which cannot be verified, though all of the women believe she is lying. After her death, she is found to have been involved in dealing
heroin and to have overdosed on it before falling from her hotel balcony, leaving it unclear whether her death was an accident, a suicide, or a homicide. ==Themes==