Sunrise on the Reaping

Haymitch Abernathy spends most of the original Hunger Games trilogy sozzled in a chair, throwing knives at nobody. Now Suzanne Collins has gone back to ask what put him there. The answer, it turns out, is a story he has spent a lifetime refusing to tell.

What it's about

The book drops us into the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell, which means double the tributes and double the odds against a District 12 kid who never asked to be anyone's symbol. We already know how it ends: Haymitch walks out alive. What Collins is after is the cost of that survival, the friends made and lost, the small acts of defiance that Panem's cameras were never meant to catch. It is an origin story told backward, filling in a grief we only ever saw the aftermath of.

Because this is a prequel, the shape of the ending is no secret and Collins clearly knows it. The tension lives in the how and the who, not the whether. Expect her usual mix of blunt violence, sly propaganda, plus a young narrator learning exactly how the sausage of empire gets made.

Why everyone's talking about it

Collins does not publish often, which is precisely why each new entry becomes an event. "Sunrise on the Reaping" arrived in March 2025 as one of the biggest launches of the year, with midnight releases, sold-out first printings, plus a film already locked for November 2026. If you loved "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" for the way it complicated a villain, this promises the same trick aimed at a beloved wreck of a man.

Who it hits for: anyone who read the original trilogy young and has been quietly nursing feelings about Haymitch ever since, plus newer readers who came in through the recent films. Who might skip it: readers allergic to prequels that fill in gaps they were happy to imagine themselves and anyone hoping Collins has softened. She has not. The Games are still the Games and she is still using them to say uncomfortable things about spectacle, complicity, memory and who gets to survive the retelling.

The verdict, for now

If the Hunger Games books meant something to you, this is an easy yes. The smart move is to read it before the movie recasts every face in your head. If you bounced off the series the first time, one more trip to the arena probably will not change your mind. Either way, be warned: you may never look at that drunk in the chair the same way again.