Five is not like any other novel I’ve read. It’s a fast-paced, urgent, entertaining psychological thriller with fascinating flawed characters. Funny at times, sad at others, thoughtful and surprising throughout.
Here’s the premise: Five strangers are waiting on a suburban London train platform. In five minutes, one of them will be hit by an oncoming train and die. They don’t know this. But you do.
Ilona Bannister has broken down the fourth wall, so we the reader know a lot about these characters’ thoughts that they wouldn’t necessarily want us to know. At first, we see them superficially, the way you might clock a stranger on your commute. A mother trying to control her energetic six-year-old. A handsome, smug businessman. An unfriendly older woman. A young man in a burgundy pinstripe suit with a red wine and orange knit scarf that somehow works. We make snap judgements, as one does. And then the author takes us directly into the lives of each of them. We see disability, abuse, addiction, narcissism, and trauma. Then we return to the platform, minutes ticking into seconds. Who will it be?
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I speak to Ilona about how a lightning bolt idea combining people-watching on a London bus with a local cycling death inspired her novel Five, a national bestseller. We talk about her no-outline writing process, how she developed the novel’s snarky omniscient narrator, the research she did into train platforms and forensic pathology, and the moral dilemmas she wanted the reader to sit with long after the last page.
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00:00 Elena meets Ilona
00:00 Welcome to the Podcast
00:15 Meet the Novel Five
00:42 Platform Countdown Premise
01:41 Moral Dilemmas and No Spoilers
02:00 Author Joins the Show
04:25 Shift to Thriller Writing
06:21 Building the Five Strangers
08:44 Reading the Opening Scene
11:55 Writing Without an Outline
15:21 Creating the Omniscient Narrator
23:11 Research Process and Accuracy
24:33 Obsessive Train Research
25:24 Reading Mrs Worth
26:41 Emma and Motherhood Judgment
29:50 Luna Defends Neurodiverse Kids
33:31 Lawyer Mindset in Fiction
34:54 Next Book and Character Voices
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