Suzanne Collins is writing a new Hunger Games book — and congrats everyone, it’s the Haymitch prequel story many (myself included) have been clamoring for.
(Everyone say thank you to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star Rachel Zegler for manifesting this back in 2021).
Titled Sunrise on the Reaping, the new book will take place 24 years before the first Hunger Games book — on the dawn of the Second Quarter Quell. If you’re not super plugged into the Hunger Games timeline, that’s the game that Katniss and Peeta’s grumpy mentor Haymitch Abernathy (played by Woody Harrelson in the movies) won, by outsmarting the Gamemakers.
A new Hunger Games book right after the box office success of Hunger Games prequel movie might seem like a cash grab, but as longtime Hunger Games movie producer Nina Jacobson told Polygon last year, Collins is selective about when she returns to this world.
“Suzanne, the originator and North Star of everything that we try to do with these books, she doesn’t write just to make money,” Jacobson said. “She writes when she has something to say.”
And boy, does Collins have something to say this time!
“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 press release from Scholastic. “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.”
Will Sunrise on the Reaping get a Lionsgate film adaptation? It’s very likely, especially since Jacobson seemed super hopeful that Collins would write another book. And Haymitch’s backstory was cut from the main Hunger Games films in order to streamline them, so this would be a perfect chance to showcase it. But news is quiet on that front (for now).
Sunrise on the Reaping comes out on March 18, 2025.
