Baby Names from Books

This common Arabic name is related to Aaron, but feels far more distinctive in the US. Haroun Khalifa is the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Offred is not technically a name but the "slave name" of a woman given to a man — literally Of Fred — in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Offred, who was stripped of her own name, is the main protagonist of the book and now the hit TV series, starring Elisabeth Moss. The novel is set in a patriarchal society in which fertile women like Offred are kept by men for the purposes of reproduction. Offred is definitely not a name you'd want to give to your baby girl.

Douglas Adams invented this name for a character (aka Tricia) in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It has a nice, trilly sound, and is accessible via its kinship with Gillian/Jillian.

Moll is one of those names that is used all the time as a nickname for a nickname, but rarely put on the birth certificate. Moll Flanders is an eponymous 18th century novel by Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe,

The name of the protagonist in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah.

Variation of Abilene.

This rare English surname's most famous bearers are Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie: the four siblings who are the protagonists of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books. It probably derives from Pevensey, the name of the bay in East Sussex, England where William the Conqueror landed in 1066.

The name of the protagonist in Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son.

The mixed-race heroine of one of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives searches for knowledge and power.

Samuel Johnson invented the name Rasselas for the title character of his novel, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. Rasselas is actually the son of the prince.