The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a dystopian novel for young readers by the American author Suzanne Collins, released on 19 May 2020. It is a prequel to her Hunger Games trilogy, set sixty-four years before the events of the first book, and it appeared in hardcover, ebook and audiobook editions.

The protagonist is eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow, the future president of Panem, at the point when the Games are being rebuilt as a spectacle and students are assigned to mentor the tributes. Snow is paired with Lucy Gray Baird, the girl chosen from District 12, and much of the novel is the two of them negotiating the rules of an event that has not settled into its final form.

Collins writes from the perspective of a character the earlier trilogy only shows at the end of his life, which moves the reader's attention from how the institution is escaped to how it is constructed. The book's ambition is the theme of the trilogy seen from the other side, and it gives the reader a long look at an institution from inside the people who built it.