The Hunger Games

About The Hunger Games

In the ruins of North America, the totalitarian nation of Panem forces each of its twelve districts to send a boy and a girl to fight to the death on live television, punishment for a long-ago rebellion against the Capitol. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her little sister's place in the arena, and what follows is both a survival thriller and a slow-burn revolution: Katniss becomes an unwilling symbol of resistance, is forced into a love triangle staged as much for cameras as for her own heart, and is eventually pulled into open war against the Capitol's Machiavellian President Snow.

Suzanne Collins built the trilogy around sharp ideas — reality-TV spectacle, propaganda, the cost of violence on a child soldier, the seduction of power — wrapped in a fast, brutal survival plot that made it a defining YA dystopia. Two prequels, published years later, pull the lens back onto the making of the Games and the Capitol itself: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows a young, still-sympathetic Coriolanus Snow during the 10th Games, and Sunrise on the Reaping follows a teenage Haymitch Abernathy through the notorious 50th Games. Together the five books trace nearly seventy years of Panem's history and ask, repeatedly, what turns a person into a monster — or a martyr.