Love in the Time of Cholera

A telegraph clerk and poet who spends decades devoted to Fermina Daza while rising through the River Company of the Caribbean, pursuing many affairs along the way.

A headstrong, convent-educated young woman who rejects Florentino's early courtship under her father's pressure and marries the physician Juvenal Urbino instead.

An aristocratic, Paris-trained physician devoted to modernizing the city and eradicating cholera, whose marriage to Fermina Daza shapes the novel's first half.

Fermina's domineering, self-made father, a mule trader whose questionable dealings built his fortune and who forcibly ends her romance with Florentino.

Fermina's aunt and chaperone, who secretly carries letters between the young lovers until her brother Lorenzo sends her away for it.