The Measure - Nikki Erlick

 It seems like just another morning. 

You make a cup of tea. 

Check the news. 

Open the front door. 

On your doorstep is a box. 

Inside the box is the exact number of years you have left to live. 

The same box appears on every doorstep across the world. 

Do you open yours?’

An original book that examines the fragility of life, how prejudice and discrimination are easy to perpetuate and how love endures the most violent storms.

I found this to be a unique premise. A powerful realisation for me was that we are living our lives without the boxes but is that the only difference between ourselves and the population in the book! None of us know how long we have to live but would the knowing encourage us to live our lives to the full and love our lives to the full? 

I also found it a little unsettling within the context of the world today – I’m thinking Pandemic, Ukraine and this week the devastating earthquake in Afghanistan – if we all had our strings should we, would we live our lives any differently?

The book begins in one spring and ends in another with a kind of epilogue of several years later which rounds the book off. The central characters, all from different backgrounds, different walks of life with different lengths of string, navigate the year some knowing whether their lives will be long or short, some not. For most it’s a matter of choice whether they open the box or not,  but they all  interact. The interaction might be considered contrived in some ways but it actually works very well and you lose that sense, and it’s superseded by a pleasing synchronicity. 

Politics plays a big part in the book, with such a global issue it’s not surprising but I’m unwilling to give anything away. It’s a book that could spark many a discussion. It’s thought-provoking but it’s also very moving and the characters are forced to peel away the layers and examine what is deep inside them. 

One thing that did perturb me a little was that after the initial distribution of the boxes no one gets a box until they reach the age of 22. From that I surmise that below that age no one has any inkling of potential infant or young person mortality. That aspect isn’t covered anywhere within the narrative of the book but it certainly made me wonder about how people dealt with those situations when they were in possession of their own strings.

I thought the book was well written and I warmed to the characters. I became invested in their anxieties about their futures and the dilemmas they faced because of the ‘string state’ . 

I was fortunate enough to win a proof from Caboodle run by National Book Tokens.