Ilona Bannister’s latest novel is part thriller, part philosophical experiment, and you’re the subject

Five is a countdown thriller where the listener is tasked with deciding which character meets an untimely end. Five strangers converge on a train platform bound for London Victoria. Each character is built with moral contradictions and flaws, counterbalanced by trauma and tenderness, making easy judgments impossible. Author Ilona Bannister wrote without knowing the ending, channeling her genuine uncertainty into narrative suspense. Five ultimately asks listeners to confront how reflexively we judge others, and to remember that understanding isn't required for kindness.

Dawn Gentle: The premise of Five is immediately gripping—five strangers wait for the train to London Victoria, and in five minutes, one of them will die. What inspired you to structure the novel around this countdown format while also making the listener an active participant in deciding which character meets their fate?

Ilona Bannister: When I wrote the first platform scene, it lacked the pace and feeling of impending disaster that I wanted to convey. I was using too many words to describe body positions, inner thoughts, outer judgments, and distinct behaviors. I decided to just tell the reader what was going to happen, and suddenly, one sentence—"Someone is going to die here"—did the work of many pages. Once I found the voice of that narrator who would tell the reader what was going to happen, I thought it would be fun to make the reader complicit in saying, challenging, and confronting the things all of us are thinking but will never let ourselves say aloud.

From the very first moments, the pacing is intense and immediate. How did you maintain tension and suspense throughout the novel when the outcome is told from the beginning?

I don’t plot or outline, which was an advantage for this story because it meant I also did not know which character was going to die until I was about 70 percent through the book. It was important to me to make the reader feel the sense of urgency and imminent catastrophe, the same way you would if this scene was happening in real life. If I was on a train platform while this was happening, I too wouldn’t know what was coming next. My theory was that if I was in suspense with my characters, I could convey those feelings of tension and peril to the listener. I experienced the same urgency while writing that I hope the listener can feel when we’re in the platform scenes.

You've created five very different characters—a child, a mother, a businessman, an old woman, and a gambler—brought together by circumstance. How did you ensure each character felt fully realized and not just a representative of their archetype?

I thought it was important for each character to present the listener with a moral dilemma, to make it hard to judge them. For every flaw or bad decision or unlikeable trait, I purposely tried to counter it with an emotion, childhood memory, or trauma that might explain why the character behaves the way they do. I wanted it to be difficult for the listener to decide what they think about these strangers—is it possible to dislike someone intensely but still have compassion for them? Can we think someone is selfish and narcissistic, but also admire them?

The five strangers represent all of us, because all of us are complex. All of us have done things that are embarrassing and shameful, but also selfless and triumphant. No one is all good or all bad all of the time. I tried to reflect that idea in the complicated lives of our five strangers.

The train platform becomes almost a character itself, a liminal space where these lives converge. What drew you to this setting, and what does it symbolize in the larger story?

Train platforms are inherently dangerous spaces, but we take our safety for granted because of our implicit social contract that we will all behave in acceptable and sensible ways in public. But one odd behavior or bad decision or chance encounter can suddenly make a train platform a deadly setting and things can spiral out of control very quickly. This makes a train platform an ideal location for a suspenseful story because life and death brush past one another every time a train arrives. But we don’t usually think about it this way, or even think about it at all.

The train platform is a mundane public space where profound change can happen in an instant. Strangers stand side by side there, trying not to interact, but should something tragic occur, the ripple effect on the lives of all the strangers down the line—their missed connections, their changed plans—is enormous. So, the train platform is symbolic of our intertwined fates and our illusion of control over our destinies.

Five explores loss, fate, sacrifice, and the meaning of life. What do you hope listeners take away about how our lives intersect with others, often in ways we can't predict or control?

In Five, listeners are asked to judge the characters, the way we do when we interact with strangers in real life, and to also confront their assumptions about them. Five is a reminder that we have no idea what the people around us are carrying, and they too don’t know what we are carrying. We don’t like to be judged, but our judgment of others and their public appearance is almost involuntary.

I’m asking all of us to think about why that happens and what events from our own experiences shape how we look at people and how we respond to them in a crisis. I’m asking us to remember that when we see something we don’t understand, especially when it comes to parents and children and to neurodivergent people, to remember that we don’t need to understand the details of why someone is behaving a certain way. We just need to be decent and kind.