Suzanne Collins is taking readers back to Panem.
Scholastic will publish Sunrise on the Reaping, the fifth book in the author’s phenomenally successful Hunger Games series, next year, the press announced in a news release.
Collins kicked off her series in 2008 with The Hunger Games, a young adult work of science fiction featuring Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl in the dystopian country of Panem, who competes in an epic televised battle with other young people. The book became a massive bestseller, as did its two sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, and a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The books spawned five film adaptations, with Jennifer Lawrence starring in the first four, and Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler as the leads in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Sunrise on the Reaping will also be a prequel to the original novel, but will take place after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The new book, Scholastic says, “will revisit the world of Panem twenty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.”
“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’” Collins said in a statement. “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 ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
Sunrise on the Reaping is scheduled for publication on March 18, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
