Sunrise on the Reaping

Sunrise on the Reaping is a 2025 dystopian novel by the American writer Suzanne Collins, published by Scholastic. It is the second prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy, following The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and its events take place twenty-four years before the first novel.

The book returns to Panem for a Quarter Quell, an edition of the annual Games held every twenty-five years with a variation in the rules. This one, the fiftieth, doubles the number of tributes taken from each district. Haymitch Abernathy is a teenager in District 12 who knows the Games as a broadcast he is forced to watch, and who finds his own future decided by the reaping. Collins uses the larger tribute list and the anniversary framing to show how the Capitol uses a fixed tradition to make punishment look like a celebration, and the novel deals with the political manipulation surrounding the Games as much as with the arena itself.

The story is a prequel, so the reader already knows how the reaping system eventually treats District 12 and what the narrator will become; the interest lies in how the older characters were made into the people the trilogy remembers.