24-year-old who comes to Budapest to find his brother, with whom he has had a strained relationship. A dreamer throughout the story, he constantly suspects that life is better, more authentic, somewhere else. Both John and Scott Price are Jewish and from the US West Coast. Scott Price maintains a grudge against his younger brother John. A jock alpha male with a decidedly un-alpha childhood (he was overweight and often picked upon), he experiences regular lapses of insecurity, blaming John for his unpleasant childhood. For a living, he teaches English. Ultimately, he leaves for Romania with his wife, Mária, to escape John. Emily Oliver is an embassy worker, originally from Nebraska. The details of her work are not known to the other characters (she works in a classified information environment). She often feels unfulfilled by her work and suspects that she is living in the shadow of her father, with a distinguished foreign service career. Mark Payton is a gay Canadian academic who researches nostalgia. As his time in Budapest progresses, he becomes unable to separate his life from his work (which the other characters view as charmingly irrelevant) and eventually leaves for mental health reasons. Charles (Károly) Gábor is a junior member of a risk-averse venture capital firm. Of Hungarian ancestry (his parents escaped during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution) he came to Budapest hoping to earn a fortune, but his lethargic firm refuses his proposals. Eventually, he grows bitter, suspecting that all of Hungary's entrepreneurial spirits have been drained by four decades of Communism. He independently gathers investment capital to restart the Horváth Press. Karen Whitley is John Price's officemate, described by Nicky M. as "the office airhead", and the woman to whom John Price loses his virginity. Nicky Mankiewiliczki-Pobudziej (aka Nicky M.) is John Price's artist girlfriend who, while affectionate toward him, is also inerrantly selfish. While allowing sexual relations to flow freely, she refuses to give him any emotional support. She also has an affair with Emily Oliver. Mária is Scott Price's fiancée and, later, wife, of Hungarian ancestry. Despite her evident affection for Scott, she sleeps with John at one point in the novel. Nádja is an elderly Hungarian piano player. A cosmopolite with dazzling stories, she becomes a close friend of John throughout the novel, and he even experiences a sexual attraction to her, wishing she were younger so that he could be featured in