Five lives. Five stories. Four will live—one will die. Who it will be? In this slow-burn masterpiece of psychological fiction, the choice is all yours.

Have you ever tried to pass the time by imagining the lives of the strangers standing next to you? Ilona Bannister’s Five introduces readers to five seemingly random people waiting for a train. But these are not just any five people. From the beginning we know that one of them is going to die soon. Very soon. In five minutes the next train to London will arrive, killing one of them. But before this happens you will learn their stories.

None of these people are saints. Readers might fall in love with the beautiful young man who is on the verge of gambling his life away. They may pity the cantankerous old woman who has fallen to the ground yet is refusing help. Perhaps readers will look away from the child throwing a tantrum. Or judge his mother, who must surely be to blame. And some will be curiously compelled by the successful and damaged businessman orbiting them all.

These are the candidates for this morning’s misfortune. But they don’t know it. Only you know. And you, our complicit reader, will not be able to resist deciding who deserves to walk away, and who deserves only five more minutes to live.

An incredibly original novel that breaks the fourth wall and asks the reader to be judge, jury, and executioner, Five looks at some of the most complicated issues of contemporary life: motherhood, disability, addiction. Every stranger has a story. And in Ilona Bannister’s skillful hands, five people’s stories come together to create an unforgettable novel.

I loved the format of this one. It’s being marketed as a thriller, and while I get why, I don’t really think that’s what this book is. It reads more like a dark, unforgiving character study with a clock attached. We’re not here to argue about genre, though. We’re here to talk about how riveted I was the whole time.

From the very first page, you know someone is going to die at a train station in a matter of minutes. You just don’t know who. There are five people standing on the platform, waiting for the same train to London, and one of them isn’t getting on it alive. The book then bounces between two layers. On one layer, you’re watching the clock tick down at the platform, with train announcements and little glimpses of the scene where the accident is about to happen. On the other layer, you’re dropping into each of these five people’s lives, learning who they are, what they’re carrying, and what brought them to this particular morning on this particular train. By the time the train pulls in, you know all of them in a way you don’t usually know strangers, and one of them is about to be gone.

The five themselves are a wild mix. There’s a young boy who is basically the spawn of Satan. There’s his mother, who is doing her best with him but is clearly running on fumes. There’s a man who seems to know the two of them in some way, and that connection slowly comes into focus. There’s a cantankerous old woman who has fallen on the platform and is refusing every offer of help. And there’s a sharply dressed young man who is hiding something pretty significant under the suit.

None of these people are easy. Some of them are awful. A few of them have moments of grace that surprised me, but most of them are somewhere in the messy middle, which is where I think the book is really living. Bannister does a great job of making you feel something for each of them, even the ones you really don’t want to feel anything for. By the halfway mark I was rooting for some and heavily judging others.

The structure is the engine here, and it works. The train announcements act like a metronome. Every time you settle into a character’s interior life, you get pulled back to the platform with another reminder that the clock is still moving. It keeps the pressure on without ever feeling gimmicky. The format also lets the book go deep without losing momentum.

I will say, this isn’t a book where the reveal at the end is the big payoff. The question of who dies matters, but the journey to that moment is the real point. By the time you find out, you’ve spent so much time inside these people’s lives that the death feels less like a twist and more like an inevitability you’ve been bracing for. That’s part of why I don’t really read it as a thriller. The mechanics are more literary. The interest is in who these people are, not in solving anything.

The themes the book is digging into are weighty. Motherhood. Addiction. What it’s like to live with a disability. The way we look at strangers and decide they’re either someone we like or someone we don’t. Bannister never preaches about any of it. She just builds the characters, lets you sit with them, and trusts you to do the rest of the work.

I had a great time with this one. It moves quickly, the writing is sharp, and the structure does something that I haven’t seen done quite this way before. If you love deep character studies of questionable people, especially ones with a propulsive setup that keeps you turning pages, give this one a shot. Just don’t go in expecting a traditional thriller. Go in expecting to be hooked, and you will be.

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