Five by Ilona Bannister

Published by Crown on May 5, 2026

Five is the number of characters who might die before the novel Five ends. We know someone will die because Ilona Bannister tells us that in the novel’s early pages. Bannister describes the potential dead as “the child, the mother, the businessman, the old woman, and the gambler.” We know them as Gideon, Emma, Liam, Mrs. Worth, and Sonny.

The plot is organized around those characters as they converge in a subway station. Some are on the track as a delayed train begins to approach. One has decided to commit suicide. A character who remains on the platform is having a heart attack. The child is balance-walking along the lip of the platform as the train approaches. Their fates unfold in minutes, but the death drama is broken up by backstories that take the reader on a journey through each life, from infancy to the present.

Gideon is the child from hell. He never bonded with his mother Emma. He disobeys her, hits her with her high heel shoe, booby traps the cupboard so a rolling pin will fall on her when she opens it. Child psychologists have done nothing to improve his behavior. Nannies have quit, the most recent one after Gideon crapped in her shoes. When Gideon, having escaped Emma’s grasp, almost falls onto the subway tracks, she briefly considers not catching him.

If Gideon is the child from hell, Mrs. Worth might be the mother from hell. Not her fault, really, given her own motherless childhood. Mrs. Worth (she hates the name Matilda) was raised by a father who was a surgeon in the war until the atrocities he observed caused him to lose his grip. As a child, Matilda’s father taught her how to dissect dead animals, some of which (including the neighbor’s dog) he kills for that purpose. Mrs. Worth, now a pathologist, is distant from her own son (conceived by one of the lovers whose sexual performance she charted in her lab notes), a distance that grew when she realized she was turning into her father.

Sonny was another bad kid, in the sense that he’s hyperactive and has no use for rules that are meant to restrain him. By the time he reaches the subway platform in his late twenties, Sonny has a serious gambling addiction and has given up on himself. He understands that he doesn’t “fit into a world that was not built for people like him.”

Sonny was in nursery school when his father died. His mother Luna, beside herself with grief, can’t take Sonny out in public for fear that his misbehavior will annoy others. In challenging Sonny’s teachers to be less boring. Luna won’t admit that her son has any problems of his own making because doing so would cause her to blame herself for not raising him properly.

Liam grew up in a poor family with a disabled brother and devoted mother. Liam and his brother Danny overcame hardships, grew a business, and hired Emma as their CFO. Liam marries a woman and stays with her until she becomes “a bit old and puffy.” While he is with his third wife, Emma decides he would be a perfect sperm donor. But Liam’s story is less about Emma and more about the damage he does to his relationship with his brother because he fears he will lose Danny to the caregiver Danny loves.

So will one of them really die? Ilona Bannister telegraphs the outcome well before it arrives: “There is no open-ended scene where you are left guessing if perhaps everyone survives in the end and the story is just a comment on the fragility of the human condition and the diversity of human suffering: a clever mechanism to remind us that everyone has a story, and not everyone is who or what they seem.” But that’s exactly what the novel is, regardless of the outcome. Five people with complex histories are together in a moment that will shape the rest of four lives and end the fifth.

Bannister assumes that readers will pick a favorite character for an early grave and will root for others to survive. She then challenges the reader to ask why one character is “worthy of surviving in the internal universe of your brain” while another is not. The novel’s brilliance lies in that philosophical inquiry.

Motherhood is a theme that ties the stories together. Even when mothers do their best, they are blamed for the sins of their children. Mothers, “even if they were good mothers, even if they had sacrificed for and loved their boys, even if they had given them good homes, were still and always would be the bad mothers of terrible sons.”

Bannister plays with the novel’s form, occasionally using her narrative voice to speak directly to the reader, as when she explains to readers that they might view surviving characters as having metaphorically died in part, “if you like those kinds of metaphors. Metaphors about life and death, or the death of the spirit versus the death of the body, or the death of the past to enable the birth of the future, these are always good topics to raise in book club when the conversation lags.” Because talking about metaphors is easier than talking about why we wanted a particular character to die. I’m not usually a fan of an author’s intrusion into the narrative, but Bannister guides the reader to lessons that are too important to miss.

The story is sad but life-affirming. Do you deserve a better fate than her characters, Bannister asks. It doesn’t matter what we think we deserve. We all live for a time, experiencing moments of pain and moments of joy before we inevitably die. An author can decide which character will die but, in life, those choices seem random. All we can know is that “life and death happen because they do.” At the same time, Five is a testament to “how extraordinary ordinary people are.”

Five delivers the tension of a thriller and the deep character development of a literary novel. Bannister’s prose is precise in its depiction of human nature. She is brutal in her honest observation of human failings but compassionate in her understanding of human weaknesses. Five is the best novel I’ve read in 2026 and may be the best novel I’ll read this year.

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