Giant’s Bread

Vernon Deyre

Vernon Deyre is the last of the Deyres of Abbots Puissants, a boy who invents imaginary playmates and grows into a composer whose music seems to arrive from somewhere beyond his own will. He is unambitious in the ordinary sense yet utterly possessed by his art, and the women who love him — Nell, Jane, his mother — keep discovering that they cannot hold what the music claims first. His early life sets the whole arc in motion: a sensitive heir caught between family decline, first love, and a talent that will demand everything.

Nell Vereker

Nell Vereker is the daughter of a woman who has fought her way through life on credit and nerve, dressing her girl beautifully so that she will marry well and repay the campaign. Nell is lovely, young, and seemingly defenceless, but she has learned her mother's lessons about what a man is worth. Vernon Deyre dances well and is frightfully useful — yet he is hopeless as a parti, and her mother warns her against foolishness. Her divided feelings about Vernon set the emotional stakes of his early manhood.

Jane Harding

Jane Harding is a musician who knows exactly what she wants and goes for it, in contrast to Vernon, who does not know what he wants but is driven anyway. She tells Sebastian that music will be the power that drives Vernon, and that whatever It is will be served no matter the cost — a prophecy that hangs over the whole story. Her flat, her playing, and her unsparing honesty make her the one person who understands both the gift and its price.

Sebastian Levinne

Sebastian Levinne begins as the lonely boy next door whom Vernon and Joe first besiege and then befriend, and grows into a celebrated composer and Vernon's most devoted ally. He is the one who recognizes Vernon when everyone else has given him up, coaxing memory back with patience and a stiff drink. His friendship is the spine of Vernon's musical life, and his knowledge of the whole story makes him the keeper of its secrets.

Joe Waite

Joe Waite is Vernon's playmate at Abbots Puissants, a girl who climbs trees with tomatoes in her pockets and refuses to pelt a boy who looks as though he is simply hating things. It is Joe who proposes the white flag and the parley that turns Sebastian Levinne from enemy into lifelong friend. Her instinct for kindness over victory gives the early chapters their moral center and shapes the trio that the rest of the book depends on.

George Green

George Green is the kind of man others call good — reliable, unremarkable, and quietly devoted — and his presence in the novel's later movement forces every question about love, loyalty, and what a person owes to the past. He is tied to Vernon both by the war and by Nell, and his decency makes the complications that follow harder rather than easier to bear. He matters because he is the ordinary good man against whom Vernon's extraordinary, destructive gift is measured.