NEW YORK — Savannah Miller, 26 years previous and a “Hunger Games” reader for half of her life, has solely grown in admiration for Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novels.
“As a kid, you focus so much on the plot and the action,” stated Miller, a researcher on the Albert Einstein Faculty of Drugs and amongst tons of of followers on the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Sq. who attended the midnight launch celebration for “Sunrise on the Reaping,” revealed Tuesday. “As an adult, I connected to the characters a lot more and had more of an emotional response. I also appreciated the writing a lot.”
“Hunger Games” followers gathered in bookstores all over the world for celebrations of the fifth novel in Collins’ blockbuster sequence a couple of post-apocalyptic society through which combatants are compelled to battle on digital camera for his or her survival. Attendees in New York — some dressed as Haymitch Abernathy, Effie Trinket and different characters — went on scavenger hunts, tried to unravel “Hunger Games”-themed puzzles and tried out a “Hunger Games” trivia recreation so difficult that even Collins’ editor, David Levithan, stated he couldn’t reply all of them.
Many arrivals Monday night time had been girls of their 20s and 30s who had cherished the books in center faculty and renewed their attachment when Collins unexpectedly resumed the novels 5 years in the past.
“I’ve been reading the books since I was 12,” 23-year-old actor Ella Dolynchuk stated. “It’s a big part of my life, my childhood, and I love reading them as an adult, when I can really understand them.”
“Sunrise on the Reaping” had already reached No. 1 on Amazon earlier than its publication and is extensively anticipated to be one of many yr’s greatest fiction sellers. Though the ebook was embargoed earlier than its official gross sales date, gleeful followers had been posting movies on social media in current days that confirmed off superior copies apparently shipped too early or prematurely positioned on cabinets, together with at Los Angeles Airport, a Sam’s Membership in California and an Indigo bookstore in Canada.
In line with Scholastic Inc., the 4 earlier books have bought tens of hundreds of thousands of copies and have been revealed in 55 languages. Movie variations helped launch the profession of Jennifer Lawrence, who starred as heroine Katniss Everdeen within the films primarily based on the primary three books, and have grossed greater than $3 billion worldwide. A display screen model of “Sunrise on the Reaping” is scheduled for November 2026, with Francis Lawrence returning as director.
Collins had deliberate to finish the sequence after the third ebook, “Mockingjay,” which got here out in 2010. However she startled readers and the publishing world by saying a decade later that she was engaged on a fourth quantity, the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Levithan had not suspected that Collins was returning to the ravaged land of Panem.
“She decides, and then she springs it on me,” Levithan stated Monday night time in the course of the Barnes & Noble launch. “We had never talked about prequels. The trilogy was the trilogy, and then she realized she had more to say.”
The brand new ebook begins at dawn, with the reaping of the Fiftieth Starvation Video games. It’s set 24 years earlier than the unique “Hunger Games” novel, which got here out in 2008, and 40 years after “Songbirds and Snakes.”
Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman gladiator video games for her earlier books. For “Sunrise on the Reaping,” her muses included Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume.
“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, who didn’t attend the Barnes & Noble occasion and barely provides interviews, stated in an announcement launched when the brand new ebook was introduced. “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.”
