ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Five by Ilona Bannister

Posted on 6th May 2026 By Nicola

Five by Ilona Bannister is published by Juniper and is available now. My thanks to the publishers and author for the proof copy.

Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.

Take note of their positions. The child, the mother, the businessman, the old woman and the gambler.

One of them will die despite your attachment to them. There is probably one you want to get rid of. You don’t have to admit who. But perhaps you should ask yourself why.

The train has stopped.

Someone is dead.

Was it who you chose?

It wasn’t your fault …

So why, dear reader, do you feel so guilty?

Five stories. Five minutes until a life ends. Unfolding in real time, FIVE doesn’t just tell a story; it provokes, unsettles, and lingers. By weaving together the stories of those complex, flawed lives, Bannister creates a tapestry of human struggle, resilience, and hope. FIVE offers no easy answers, but rather a nuanced exploration of the human condition in all its messy complexity.

A busy train platform, a train due in five minutes, the usual mixture of people stand waiting. But when the train comes, one person will die. We are told it will be one of five people, a child, his mother, a businessman, a young gambler, or an old lady. It’s an unusual premise: a conversational, often mocking narrator gives us an overview of the train station situation, interspersed with deep dives into the backgrounds of the main players, so that we find out not only what led to them being on the platform on this fateful day but also what led to them being the person they are. We also get to see the impact that the death has on each of them.

What I like most about Ilona Bannister’s writing in this book (and I saw it in her first book, When I Ran Away, too) is that she gets to the heart of motherhood – how it feels to be a mother and what a mother will do for her children – with searing and unflinching honesty. This is what felt like the overarching theme of the book for me,

Expect more than a psychological thriller. Expect a human story about complex and messy lives, unlikeable characters but ones whose stories draw you in and make you realise that nothing is ever black and white. Who really knows what is behind the facade of the people you pass by in everyday life? I really enjoyed Five and found it a well-written, thought-provoking, powerful and engrossing character-driven story.

ILONA BANNISTER is a New Yorker who has lived in the UK for many years with her husband and sons. She is a dual qualified US lawyer and UK solicitor and practised immigration law in the UK before she started writing fiction. Her family’s history of migration to the US, her experience as an American mother raising children in the UK, and her work as a lawyer have led her to write stories about otherness, belonging, and what it means to be on the outside of a place looking in. Her first book When I Ran Away was longlisted for the First Novel Prize in 2021.