Lois Lowry was born in Hawaii, but because her father was in the army and her husband in the navy, she lived in New York, Pennsylvania, Tokyo, Rhode Island, California, Connecticut, South Carolina, Massachusetts and Maine, where she began her writing career. The main subject of her 30 books is human connections. She wrote her first novel, A Summer to Die, about the effect that a daughter's death has on a family (Lois Lowry lost her own sister, when she was young), and Number the Stars (1991) is also about two families under pressure, this time during Second World War.