Five: A Novel
Five: A Novel
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Ilona Bannister on Five: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two ideas on the top deck of a busThe premise of Five began not with a plot idea but with a habit Bannister had built over nearly twenty years of watching strangers on public transport. She had developed a conviction that the lives around her were richer than anything she could construct at a desk, and that conviction became the engine of the novel.
If I spoke to every person on this bus and asked them about their life story, I bet it would be so much better than any fiction that I could write because you wouldn’t believe what people have survived and triumphed and seen and done and the grief and the loss and the joy.
The second half of the premise arrived from the street outside her window. The same week she was circling that idea about strangers’ stories, a cyclist was killed at a South London intersection she walked past every day. The neighborhood was full of young families; the intersection was one commuters used every morning. The death landed differently than news usually does.
I had a moment of shock when I heard about it because I thought, hang on, that could be anyone. I know that could be my own husband. And I just was thinking about the street that that person had been on. And they had said goodbye that morning, not knowing that was the last time.
The two thoughts fused: everyone carries a story extraordinary enough to be fiction, and none of us knows which ordinary morning is the last one. That collision is the architecture of Five.
Two of the novel’s five characters have ADHD, and that was never going to be a neutral creative choice for Bannister. Her two sons both have ADHD and dyslexia, and the book’s restaurant scene, where a neurodiverse child’s behavior draws the judgment of strangers, came directly from what she knows at close range. She used the novel to put on the page what that position costs the parents living it.
So often parents of neurodivergent children find themselves in defense mode, in adversarial positions with school systems, with medical systems, constantly trying to explain their children’s behavior and feeling like they come up against a wall because the judgment is, well, it’s because you’re too permissive, if you would just raise the child this way, then he wouldn’t be having these issues, if you could just make him conform. But of course, these are very special people who do not naturally conform.
How she wrote it
Timing syllables at a train stationBannister doesn’t outline. She waits for characters to arrive and then follows them, an approach that had carried her through two previous novels. Five posed a problem that instinct alone couldn’t solve: the book’s entire plot unfolds across five minutes of real time, and two hundred pages of five minutes would collapse into absurdity without rigorous proof that every detail was physically possible. Her solution was to treat plausibility as a research problem.
I would time the lines of dialogue. I would time how long it takes to think a particular word. I went to my local train station. I would walk up and down it. I would pace. I would count steps. I would look at the paint. I would read a sign. I tried to get every detail that I could write to make sure that what I was presenting to the reader — that I could convince you that this was plausible.
The five-minute span wasn’t treated as a fixed container. Bannister was drawn to the way time warps under pressure, and she used that elasticity as a structural principle rather than a constraint.
I played with the idea of five minutes can be a very short time or it can feel like an eternity, especially when we are faced with a crisis.
The narrator’s distinctive voice, sarcastic and direct, speaking straight at the reader, was not planned. Bannister drafted the opening platform scenes without it, and the pages were inert. She found her way out of the problem by abandoning the attempt to narrate around the reader and instead narrating to them.
I got very, very wordy, and it got very boring and slow, and it was lots of pages and very sluggish. And then when I wrote that first sentence that starts the book, I thought, oh, that’s a voice. That’s, like, a really snarky, sarcastic voice, and that’s going to be a lot of fun.
The fourth-wall break that gives Five its discomfiting energy was born from solving a dull first page.
Having two neurodiverse sons changed not just what she writes about but when and how she physically writes. She described this shift in a virtual event for her debut novel, and the habit it produced carried straight into the composition of Five.
I’ve learned to write in short bursts instead of sitting, insisting on having hours... because in the way my family operates and what my kids need from me, I don’t really have that luxury of time... while walking and running, that is when I’m actually thinking about my characters and my plots and they all start to come together. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Motherhood, written by accidentBannister’s first two novels were both deeply concerned with mothers and children, and she went into Five deliberately aiming somewhere else. She wanted to prove to herself she could write a book without that gravity pulling everything inward. What she discovered in the finished draft was that the gravity had won anyway.
I didn’t even realize that I was also writing about mothers. I had set out to write a book that was different to my previous two books, but the mother characters, because there’s a mother and son story in each of the five stories, I sort of — I was doing it subconsciously. So I think for me, motherhood will always be a thread somewhere in my characters.
Her lifelong study of strangers, the habit that seeded the whole novel, predates motherhood and runs as deep as her curiosity about what any person is carrying beneath their surface. She described it in a 2021 interview about her debut as the observation practice behind all her fiction.
People — how they dress, speak, their accents, how they interact, the objects they carry, the way they move — are fascinating to me.
writerinterviews.blogspot.com, “author interviews: Ilona Bannister”In Five, those objects and accents belong to five strangers on a platform, each hiding a life the others cannot see. The watching habit became the book’s entire premise.
What she wants us to sit with
Five minutes to decide who deserves to liveFive tells the reader on its first page that someone will die. The death is the least of Bannister’s concerns. What interested her was the web of consequences that radiates from a single stranger’s loss across an entire city, and the question of how much control any of us actually have over any of it.
I wanted to just explore the idea that we don’t have any control over what’s going to happen. We don’t know when it will be or how it will be. And that, particularly when a crisis like this happens, I wanted to look at the ripple effect of what a stranger’s death can have on many people — on the people around them but also the domino effect that it has, you know, across a whole city.
Bannister gives readers the full backstories of all five characters before the train arrives. That knowledge doesn’t let the reader off the hook. It sharpens an impossible question that the novel forces readers to answer about themselves.
We have five minutes to decide who you feel, based on what you know about their lives, deserves to die. That’s really the premise of the story.
Which character readers instinctively move to protect, and how fast they decide, is where the book does its real work. The moral experiment is not about the characters. It is about the reader making the choice.