With West Sussex libraries celebrating their centenary this year, we have invited some of our 2025 librarians to tell us about their favourite book. Tom Batten, Books Reading and Culture Librarian, Worthing Library, tells us why he would choose The Measure by Nikki Erlick.

One of the books that has really stayed with me in recent years is The Measure by Nikki Erlick which has one of the best elevator pitches of anything I’ve ever read.

You wake up one morning to find a box on your doorstep containing a string, the length of the string corresponds to how long you have left to live…would you open the box? That is the plot synopsis that a colleague gave to me when recommending the book and that was all I needed to convince me to reserve a copy – it turned out she hadn’t even read the book that’s how confident she was in the concept! Before too long staff from across the library service were reading it as the recommendation was shared throughout the county. The book, which was Nikki Erlick’s debut introduces so many ideas around how the strings would affect the wider world.

How would it affect your relationship with your partner? Would you start a relationship with someone knowing that they had a short string, and should they disclose that information? With the novel’s many characters living in America, health insurance is a big factor with companies less willing to insure someone with just a short time to live. Politics is also huge; every politician would have an opinion on the strings but would the public be less willing to vote for a candidate who won’t be able to serve their full term? Finally, the military wanted to recruit people that were likely to survive battle, even if they weren’t the most qualified. Are the strings a gift to society or have they created another form of discrimination?

The book follows a large cast of characters (eight in total) one chapter at a time as all these issues are explored. Inevitably, some are more intriguing than others, but I never lost interest. I think my one complaint with the novel would be that it was all a little neatly tied up – not in terms of the boxes and their origins – but there were too many coincidences that linked the characters when it would have been fine for them to have lived completely separate lives. It would also have been interesting to follow the life of a character in a very different environment, we hear snatches of how other countries are managing the situation – people being forced to declare their strings – but these are never fully explored.

What Erlick has managed to achieve is create perhaps the ultimate reading group book. Whatever your feelings about the writing you are guaranteed to have an opinion on the events and themes of the story and whereas politics can be quite a sensitive topic for discussion by creating a fictitious framework it’s rendered a pretty safe subject. For the record, I absolutely would not want to look at my string although I would be very curious about those of other people. You can order a copy of The Measure through the library catalogue or if you prefer to listen to an eAudiobook we also have it available on BorrowBox.