Luciano Porta

absolutely wrecked me in the way I expected it would, but also in ways I didn’t fully see coming

also, grant my beloved i love him so much

Five was a really interesting read. The premise is simple but incredibly effective: five strangers are waiting on a train platform, and from the very first page you know that one of them will die within the next five minutes. The novel spends most of its time diving into each character’s life, turning the book into a series of compelling character studies.

Overall, I found Five to be an engaging and thoughtful novel. It’s marketed like a thriller, but it feels more like a literary character study with a constant sense of suspense. Sometimes it leaned a little too heavily into the drama for my taste, but it did an excellent job of making me care about these deeply flawed people and reflecting on the judgments we make about others.