Five by Ilona Bannister: A tense moral experiment that puts the reader on trial

There’s something quietly unsettling about the opening premise of Five by Ilona Bannister—five strangers on a train platform, one of whom will be dead in minutes—and the novel wastes no time making you complicit in that outcome. From the first pages, you’re not just observing these characters; you’re weighing them.

Set against the ticking clock of an approaching train, the novel stretches a matter of minutes across its entire length. It’s an ambitious structural choice, and at times, a challenging one. Bannister intersperses the present-moment tension with flashback chapters that unpack each character’s history—the struggling gambler, the abrasive elderly woman, the overwhelmed mother and her volatile child, the polished yet fractured businessman. These glimpses into their lives are essential to the book’s central question: who deserves to live?

What works particularly well is how Bannister dismantles first impressions. Each character initially appears easy to categorize, almost archetypal, but the deeper the novel goes, the more those assumptions unravel. The man you might instinctively root for becomes harder to defend. The person you dismiss reveals unexpected depth. It’s a deliberate, effective reminder that snap judgments rarely hold up under scrutiny.

At the same time, the novel’s structure is something of a double-edged sword. Expanding five minutes into an entire narrative inevitably creates friction. The transitions back to the platform—the “here and now” scenes—can feel stretched thin, as though time itself is resisting the premise. While the flashbacks carry emotional and thematic weight, they occasionally veer into heavy exposition, reading more like information delivery than organic storytelling. It’s easy to see how difficult a balance this would be to strike, but the unevenness does show.

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One of the more intriguing elements is the way Bannister breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing the reader and pulling them into a kind of ongoing moral conversation. You’re not just watching events unfold; you’re being asked, repeatedly and uncomfortably, to decide. Who is most deserving of survival? And what does that even mean? The device is effective, especially in reinforcing the novel’s central tension, though it also sharpens the sense that this is as much an intellectual exercise as it is a story.

And that question—who deserves to die—lingers longer than any single plot point. The novel invites thoughts you might not be entirely proud of. You might find yourself judging harshly, making quick decisions, even justifying them. That’s where Five is at its strongest: not in the mechanics of its premise, but in how it exposes the reader’s own instincts and biases.

Ultimately, Five is a bold, thought-provoking piece of psychological fiction that doesn’t always land smoothly but remains compelling because of what it asks of its audience. It’s less about the inevitability of death and more about the uncomfortable calculus we perform, often without realizing it, when we look at other people.

What did you think—could you make that choice, or would you refuse to decide? Let me know in the comments.

Five releases May 5, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• Ilona Bannister, When I Ran Away (Zibby Media)
• Meet the author: When I Ran Away writer Ilona Bannister (The Sunday Post)
• How I wrote a novel as a stay at home mother by Ilona Bannister (Female First)
• Ilona Bannister (Bedside Table Books)

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