Nikki Erlick

The Measure gives every adult on earth a small wooden box containing a string, and the length of the string is the length of their life.

Erlick is not interested in the mechanism and never explains it. The novel is about what societies do next: insurance discrimination, dating apps sorted by string length, political candidates asked to disclose, and eight characters deciding whether to look at all.

It is a debut and it is more thought experiment than thriller, which some readers wanted and others did not.