Are you ready to return to the arena? Suzanne Collins and Scholastic have announced that 2025 will be the year a new prequel book to the Hunger Games saga hits the shelves.
Just Announced: A NEW Hunger Games novel by Suzanne Collins coming March 18, 2025! Pre-Order today! #TheHungerGames pic.twitter.com/Se7LdU8atv
— Scholastic (@Scholastic) June 6, 2024
Sunrise on the Reaping will take fans back to a period that influenced the original trilogy: the novel will focus, in fact, on one of the most important battles in Panem’s history, set during the Second Quarter Quell, the Hunger Games in grand style won by the young Haymitch Abernathy, who in the original trilogy is the mentor of the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen.
Here’s what we know about this Haymitch-centric Hunger Games novel coming in 2025.
On 18 March 2025, fans will get a full account of the fifty Hunger Games. It will be one of the most important editions of the Games ever: the one in which Haymitch becomes a winner, but only in name. The new book will be set 24 years before the original novel (and four decades after ‘The Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent’) and will begin in the same way: on the morning of the Games’ reaping.
“Suzanne Collins has done it again, bringing us back to the world of Panem to ask important questions about our world,” said Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade, in the book’s official announcement. “‘Sunrise on the Reaping’ is an extraordinary book, bringing new complexity, perspective, and revelations to a part of the Hunger Games story that readers longed to know more about.”
In the release, Collins shared the inspiration behind her new entry into the world of the Hunger Games. “With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea about implicit subjugation and, in his words about the ‘ease with which the many are ruled by the few’,” she said. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘True or not true?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
