Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games novel is officially a blockbuster.
Sunrise on the Reaping, the fifth book in Collins’ dystopian young adult series, sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first week on sale, publisher Scholastic announced in a news release. The novel sold more than 1.2 million copies in the U.S. alone.
Collins’ novel is a prequel to the original Hunger Games trilogy, which kicked off in 2008 with The Hunger Games. That novel was also a bestseller, along with its follow-ups, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, and the first prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised Sunrise on the Reaping as “a heartbreaking crescendo and another grimly irresistible chapter in the saga of this interlocking series.”
Collins’ novels, set in the dystopian world of Panem, were adapted into a series of films starring Jennifer Lawrence, all of them box-office hits. A movie adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping is currently in the works.
Ellie Berger, the president of trade publishing at Scholastic, said, “After nearly a year of anticipation, sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have exceeded all expectations, as has the overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response to the book across the world.”
The sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have eclipsed the numbers of Collins’ previous books in their first weeks on sale, with the new novel selling twice as many copies as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and three times as many as Mockingjay. But it has not lived up to the January release of Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, the third installment in her Empyrean romantasy series, which sold more than 2.7 million copies in its first week.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
