ILONA BANNISTER TALKS ABOUT WRITING THE FIVE: A NOVEL ON ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:05]This is um sort of a lightning bolts moment.

[00:00:09]Um I had brought an entirely different idea to my agent uh and she didn't like it and I was on the bus home. Uh I was on a uh I I just uh for context, I live in the UK. I was living in London at the time.

[00:00:22]Um so I was on a a double a double-decker bus, a big red bus and I was thinking about, you know, what am I going to do because that story didn't work out. And then I thought, well, if we if we take every person on this bus and we line them up and you start asking their life stories, it would be better than any fiction that you could ever write. You wouldn't believe what people would tell you. They would tell you about travel and children and death and loss and war and separation and triumph and tragedy. It would be you wouldn't be able to make it up.

[00:00:52]Um and then that same week, there was a very tragic cycling accident near my home. It was in the morning rush hour.

[00:00:59]Lots of people cycled into central London. I knew exactly where it was.

[00:01:03]It's a street I walked on all the time.

[00:01:05]Uh and I could picture the route the cyclist had taken down this particular road and I was just really struck by it cuz it was a neighborhood with lots of families with young children and and that's who I pictured it was, someone with a young family where suddenly that person was gone. They had died on impact in this accident.

[00:01:23]And what was that last 5 minutes when they were cycling down the road past this pub, past that apartment building, past this tree that we all pass every day? What were they thinking about?

[00:01:33]Um they had no idea it was coming. Who had they just said goodbye to not knowing they were never coming back?

[00:01:39]Um it really moved me.

[00:01:41]And then suddenly sitting on this bus, those two ideas just came together and I thought, oh my gosh, okay, five people standing on a train platform and in 5 minutes one of them's going to die.

[00:01:53]Um so what's going to happen in that 5 minutes? So we have the child and the mother.

[00:01:59]Uh So, we have Emma. She is a single mother. She's very wealthy or was formerly very wealthy. She has lots of elements of sociopathy and narcissism. And we see her when we meet her, we see her struggling on the train platform with her child Gideon.

[00:02:20]Gideon is 6 years old and he's really behaving badly. And I think all of us it's a universal experience. You are either the parent with the child who is kicking off in a public place being judged by everyone for your parenting.

[00:02:35]Or you're watching the scene. And it was really important to me to have that in the story because I wanted this train platform to feel like one that everyone has been to before. And I think it's so typical to see that, to watch a parent struggling with a child because people always have a visceral reaction to that.

[00:02:57]And there are either those people who empathize cuz they've been in that situation or those people who look and are just thinking to themselves, now that's a terrible mother. Um but the other thing about Emma and Gideon are that is that she she is actually quite a difficult, perhaps terrible, person. And that Gideon it becomes clear further on as you read, but that Gideon has some significant challenges and their relationship has some significant challenges. And their story is one of, you know, you never know what is actually going on with a mother and child. And that's why it's so important to reserve judgment.

[00:03:39]Liam is the businessman because of course on a train platform we've always got an alpha male in a good suit who's talking loudly on a phone, who is taking up who's taking up space.

[00:03:53]Um or at least that's what Liam looks like he's doing. Um uh that is the perception that he wants us all to see.

[00:04:03]Um for me uh I've written two books previously.

[00:04:08]I've I've never written very many male characters. I've always found it a challenge. My books are sort of very female-centered, but for five, I really wanted to try to write um a vivid uh male character. I really wanted to try to inhabit what his life was like.

[00:04:26]Um so Liam, of course, has a story to tell. Um and I wonder if readers will feel differently about him uh from their first meeting of him on the platform to what happens later. Mrs. Worth, uh she's 78. She's cantankerous.

[00:04:42]She's judging everything on the platform. She's quite a prickly um old lady. And um I wanted her to be there because, of course, uh women of her age, if we see them at all in public, um I think a lot of times uh they're they're just invisible or they're in the way or they move too slow or they're not someone who who people generally focus on. So, I wanted her to be present, but I wanted her to have uh a really amazing story. Um I wanted her to be a pioneer in her field.

[00:05:13]Uh and I wanted viewers to uh readers to view women of this age perhaps a bit differently once you find out what her story is.

[00:05:23]Um I have absolutely no interest in forensic pathology, but when I was looking for a career for a woman of her age in which she could be a pioneer, I realized that sort of in the '70s, there were very few women in that particular field, so that would be a good one for her to be in. Um when I I don't really plan and I don't outline. So, um it's it's more like Mrs. Worth told me that that's what she wanted to do and I thought, well, okay.

[00:05:51]Then I've got to go find out what that's about. And I read this um amazing memoir called Unnatural Causes by Dr. Richard Shepherd. He's um like the UK's foremost forensic pathologist and I had absolutely no idea what that job actually entailed and how special a person you have to be to do that and how important and critical it is for law, for science, for keeping all of us safe from disease. It's like it's an incredibly important fascinating field.

[00:06:21]So, while I found it a little bit difficult to stomach, um I did uh find it fascinating. That's one of the things that I love about writing is that I don't necessarily start out with an agenda, but once I start researching, it takes me down places that I had just never even thought about before. So, I appreciate Mrs. Worth for that.

[00:06:41]Sunny is uh he's a young man. He's 27.

[00:06:44]He's quite striking. He's very interesting. He's got a great sense of style. He's got a very kind heart. Um but he is struggling.

[00:06:53]Um uh he's struggling for lots of reasons. Um one of the reasons that I chose gambling as opposed to alcoholism or um drug abuse, I had explored alcoholism in my other books. Um so, I wanted to explore a different element.

[00:07:08]Um and uh look into something that is different that I I I actually also haven't read very much about. It doesn't It doesn't come up very often um in fiction.

[00:07:19]Uh but for me, uh Sunny's most important uh sort of characteristic in the story that I'm telling with Sunny and especially with his mom, Luna, is the one about ADHD. Um my children, my two sons, both have ADHD.

[00:07:34]Uh and when you are a parent of kids with ADHD and you start reading the literature, one of the things that you find out very soon um into it. There's a lot of uh negative sort of scary information that comes at you about how common it is for people with ADHD to seek out other sources of stimulation and dopamine hits.

[00:07:58]And um one of them is alcohol and drug use.

[00:08:03]Um and one of them is also gambling.

[00:08:06]Uh so then I started looking into gambling addiction and at the prevalence of gambling addiction specifically among young people, so people Sunny's age.

[00:08:16]Um and that has uh to do with how uh visible gambling is and how accessible.

[00:08:23]Because I mean alcohol is accessible particularly in the UK, very accessible everywhere. Um but uh drugs are less accessible.

[00:08:33]But gambling, being able to gamble here in the UK, there are betting shops on every street. Uh scratch cards in the supermarket. I mean even buying cigarettes here in the UK is quite difficult because they're now hidden behind a wall, you can't even see them.

[00:08:47]You have to ask for them specially.

[00:08:50]But you can buy a scratch ticket in any gas station. Um I had read one article in particular about a young woman who uh was trying very very hard um to stop gambling, but that was the thing that did her in. It was uh buying a candy bar and like a can of soda and then the scratch ticket being right there next to the register.

[00:09:10]Uh so so part of what drew me to that was um how uh easily attainable it is online, on your phone. It's it's it's literally everywhere if you were looking for it.

[00:09:23]Um if it's not an issue that you have, you may not realize how uh how much it is in the atmosphere, but if it is an issue for you, it it really is very hard to get away from it. So Sunny's mother is Luna.

[00:09:35]Um she is very fiery. She is uh she is her son's greatest defender.

[00:09:43]Um, again for me she was a she's an important character because um I wrote the story of Sunny and Luna not as, you know, not to speak for parents of neurodiverse children, but rather to send a message to people who work with neurodiverse children, medical professionals, education professionals, uh other parents who see parents like me with my kids and families with neurodiverse children.

[00:10:09]Um, uh their words really matter.

[00:10:14]The judgement that we receive has an impact and it's not the kind of impact that just rolls off your back.

[00:10:20]It's it stays and it sticks.

[00:10:23]Um, because children who have these conditions are judged continuously and they are constantly trying to do better but being pushed back because it's not working.

[00:10:35]Um, and if there is a lack of understanding in a school or in a medical system or in any situation, uh the children feel that judgement double.

[00:10:45]Um, and it it's a really hard thing to combat as a parent. Uh child, you know, kids kids get torn down and then it's your job as a parent to build them back up, but the story of Sunny and Luna is one where you see how Luna struggles and you see how much she loves this kid and she's doing absolutely everything that she possibly can.

[00:11:07]But but there does come a point where even a parent cannot do enough to save a child because that child has to at some point figure it out himself.

[00:11:18]Um, and I think that that is just that's a story that's very close to my heart and uh it's really a message that the way you treat people like Sunny in their childhood at school if if they get the message continuously that they are wrong, they are bad, they are in the wrong place, you are doing the wrong thing, nothing you are doing is right.

[00:11:36]If they get that message all the time, um it it has repercussions for the rest of their lives. And that is why Sunny finds himself in the place that he does.

[00:11:46]When I wrote the first platform scene, I I didn't have the idea of the narrator. So, I found myself um really tripping over my words, and I couldn't make the action fast enough because I was saying too much, and there were too many sentences, and there was too much explanation.

[00:12:04]And I thought, okay, well, this isn't really working out. Why don't I just tell the reader what I'm doing, like what's going to happen.

[00:12:11]And then once I wrote that first sentence, I thought, oh, this is interesting.

[00:12:15]Like, why don't we have someone there who's telling us what's going on? And then when I started to feel the energy of like, oh, this narrator is really snarky and sarcastic and really British and very judgmental, and that's so fun.

[00:12:29]And I um you know, this person is saying everything that you would never say, but that you are definitely thinking when you're in public and you're watching people. And it was really fun and liberating to get to write that voice, to get to write a voice that says all the things that people are thinking and never say because it's inappropriate and it's uncomfortable. And um once I figured out that that's that's what was happening, uh the platform has made a lot more sense, and it became really fun to write them.

[00:12:59]I find moments of crisis fascinating. I find before and after is is fascinating to me. Um partly that's because I I am from New York um and I was in New York on 9/11. I was uh in an office on Wall Street. And um I was in the crowd of people that was running away um as the towers were burning. I ran to Staten Island ferry terminal. I'm from Staten Island. I ran there with a friend, and we were in the terminal at the point when the tower had collapsed.

[00:13:27]And I have uh very strong visual vivid memories as anyone did who was there of what happened, of how people reacted, of uh when when people are actually tested and we are in a moment of high alert, um what do they actually do?

[00:13:47]It's very different from what you expect and it's very different from what you think.

[00:13:51]And also your own reaction as a person might be very different from what you think you would do or how you think you would react or how you think you would feel.

[00:13:59]So I always draw upon that moment. That was a pivotal moment in my life.

[00:14:03]And I always draw upon that moment um when I think about these, you know, of of what I'm describing here. What What does it feel like when we really come to seeing death? What does that mean? How does that feel?

[00:14:16]Um so in thinking about what was happening on the platform, I really wanted to create that sense of rising anxiety, but also uh chaos unfurling.

[00:14:29]But what's interesting um is that we are in the UK in this book.

[00:14:34]Um and it is different culturally um in terms of how people uh react in public to things.

[00:14:41]Um culturally, uh I would say, you know, I've lived here a long time, 20 years. Um so I think that the way that the British respond to uh chaos around them um is a bit more restrained. Uh there is a bit more politeness and I think that comes through in some of the things that the characters are doing or or trying not to do.

[00:15:01]Um so for me uh in in in thinking about um how to make it all unfold, I had lots of moments of like deep focus and concentration in trying to remember how it felt to be in a moment of of high anxiety.

[00:15:19]Um but also for this book, I did a lot of walking up and down train platforms counting numbers of steps that it takes to come to the edge of the platform.

[00:15:32]What do the signs say? How much space is there? What is the orientation?

[00:15:37]And a huge amount of research into how trains actually work. What is the speed?

[00:15:41]How do they break?

[00:15:43]Who should be present? What is the protocol? There was a huge amount of technical research into the actual mechanics and logistics to make it feel as realistic as possible. And then once I was doing the actual writing, again as I say, I don't plan and I don't outline. So, I really tried to physically put myself in the situation.

[00:16:05]And for each character, I was trying to react as as soon as someone did something, I would thought about like, "Okay, what's my what's my reaction?

[00:16:12]What is my spontaneous reaction as that person? How would a person actually react?" And I tried to channel that energy. So, hopefully that's how it it feels.