“It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister."Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.”

American author, young adult and middle-grade fiction

Lauren Oliver is an American author of young adult and middle-grade fiction. She is known for novels including Before I Fall, Panic, and the Delirium trilogy, and for the range of her work across several age groups. Before I Fall was adapted into a major motion picture in 2017, and Panic was later developed as a series by Amazon Studios, where Oliver served as creator, writer, and showrunner. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she was a 2012 nominee for the E. B. White Read Aloud Award for Liesl & Po. She also wrote the middle-grade fantasy novel The Spindlers.