Catching Fire

Catching Fire was published by Scholastic on 1 September 2009 and is the second of the three Hunger Games novels that made Suzanne Collins one of the best-selling young adult authors in English. Collins had worked as a writer for children's television before turning to fiction, and the second book begins almost immediately after the first.

The novel does two things at once. It develops the politics that sat under the first book, showing a Panem where every district has been policed differently and where Katniss is now watched by the same state she briefly outwitted; and it returns her to the Games themselves, because the Capitol schedules a special edition for the anniversary of the rebellion. Peeta, Haymitch and Gale each take up positions around her, and the book introduces a set of victors from other districts, including Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason, whose skill at surviving has not made them loyal.

The tour that opens the book takes Katniss and Peeta through every district in turn, which is the novel's way of showing the reader the country the first book only glimpsed through the fence of District 12. Her relationship with Peeta is now public, scripted and watched, and the Capitol's answer to the symbol she has become is to change the rules of its own competition. The three novels were adapted into four films between 2012 and 2015, with Catching Fire arriving in 2013 as the second, directed by Francis Lawrence. It is the middle volume of the trilogy, and it ends in the middle of a plan rather than at the end of one.