The Hunger Games books in order (and what happens in each one)

Five books. Two possible orders. One of them is wrong for a first read, and it’s the one a surprising number of people try anyway.

Suzanne Collins has published five Hunger Games novels since 2008: the original trilogy, plus two prequels that arrived a decade and a half apart. If you’re starting from zero, or if you read the trilogy in high school and are catching up on where the prequels fit, here’s the full lineup, in the order that actually works, along with what happens in each book without spoiling the ending of any of them.

Publication order versus story order

These are not the same list, and mixing them up is the single most common way people accidentally spoil Catching Fire for themselves.

#	Title	Published	Story timeline
1	The Hunger Games	2008	74th Hunger Games
2	Catching Fire	2009	75th Hunger Games (Third Quarter Quell)
3	Mockingjay	2010	Immediately after Catching Fire
4	The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes	2020	10th Hunger Games, 64 years earlier
5	Sunrise on the Reaping	2025	50th Hunger Games (Second Quarter Quell), 24 years earlier

Read them in publication order. The two prequels were written to be read by someone who already knows how the trilogy ends, and both lean on that knowledge for effect. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows young Coriolanus Snow, who becomes the trilogy’s president and villain, and the book only lands the way Collins intended if you already know what he turns into. Sunrise on the Reaping does something similar with Haymitch Abernathy, the perpetually drunk mentor from the original books, by showing you exactly why he drinks.

If you insist on strict chronological order anyway, it runs Songbirds and Snakes, Sunrise on the Reaping, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay. Most readers who try it once switch back to publication order for a second read, having already spoiled themselves on Snow and Haymitch’s fates the first time through.

1. The Hunger Games (2008)

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12, the poorest of the twelve districts that make up Panem, a nation built from the ruins of North America after an unspecified catastrophe. Once a year, the Capitol forces each district to send one boy and one girl, chosen by lottery, to fight to the death in a televised arena. It’s punishment for a rebellion that happened generations earlier, and it’s also the Capitol’s favorite form of entertainment.

When her twelve-year-old sister Prim is chosen, Katniss volunteers to take her place. What follows is survival, strategy, and the beginning of a public performance Katniss never asked to give: convincing the cameras, and eventually the districts, that she’s exactly who they need her to be.

This is the book most people mean when they say “the first Hunger Games book,” and it’s a self-contained enough story that you could stop after it and feel like you’d read a complete novel. Almost nobody does.

2. Catching Fire (2009)

Katniss and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark survived the 74th Games, which is a problem, because their survival looked too much like defiance to the people running the Capitol. Catching Fire opens with Katniss trying to manage the fallout of an act she didn’t fully intend as rebellion, while President Snow makes it clear that her family’s safety depends on how convincingly she can walk that back.

The book’s second half turns on the Third Quarter Quell, the 75th Hunger Games, where every 25 years the Capitol adds a special rule to the Games as a twist. For this Quell, the tributes are reaped from the existing pool of victors, which means Katniss is going back into the arena against people who have already won once. It’s the darkest structural joke in the series: survival was supposed to mean the Games were over.

3. Mockingjay (2010)

The trilogy’s conclusion picks up immediately after Catching Fire and moves the story out of the arena entirely. District 13, believed destroyed decades earlier, turns out to have survived underground, and it becomes the base for an open rebellion against the Capitol. Katniss is recruited as its symbol, the Mockingjay, whether she wants the role or not.

This is the book where the series stops being about a game and becomes about a war, with all the ugliness that shift implies. It’s also the book readers tend to remember as the hardest one, both structurally and emotionally, because Collins refuses to let the ending feel like a clean victory.

4. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020)

A ten-year gap in publication, then a prequel set 64 years before Katniss’s Games. Eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow, from a once-wealthy Capitol family fallen on hard times, is assigned as a mentor for the 10th Hunger Games, an event that at this point is still crude, poorly attended, and losing its audience. His tribute is Lucy Gray Baird, a District 12 girl from a traveling performer group called the Covey, and the book follows what Snow is willing to do to make sure she survives, and what that reveals about the man he becomes.

The book doubles as an origin story for the Hunger Games itself: the arena, the sponsor system, the televised spectacle all get built, in crude early versions, over the course of this novel. If you’ve ever wondered why the Games work the way they do in the original trilogy, this is where those mechanics come from.

5. Sunrise on the Reaping (2025)

The most recent addition, published fifteen years after Mockingjay and set 24 years before it. Sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy is reaped for the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, in which each district must send twice the usual number of tributes. Readers of the original trilogy already know two things going in: Haymitch survives, and he becomes the bitter, hard-drinking mentor Katniss meets decades later. Sunrise on the Reaping spends the whole book explaining the distance between those two facts.

It’s also the book that most directly connects the two prequels back to the original trilogy. Characters, and the Capitol’s propaganda machine specifically, reappear in ways that recontextualize scenes from The Hunger Games you may not have thought about twice on a first read.

What year is The Hunger Games set in?

Suzanne Collins has never given Panem a specific real-world year. The series is set generations after an unnamed environmental and social collapse in what used to be North America, described only as “the not-too-distant future” in Collins’ own framing. Fan calculations based on in-text details (character ages, the number of Hunger Games that have occurred, and references to the world “now”) have produced estimates ranging from the early 2100s to several centuries out, but none of them are confirmed by the author or the publisher. If a source gives you an exact year, treat it as fan math.

What is the Quarter Quell?

Every 25th anniversary of the Hunger Games, the Capitol adds a special twist to that year’s Games, called a Quarter Quell. Three have appeared across the series: the 25th Games (the First Quarter Quell, referenced in Catching Fire but not shown as a full story, where the districts had to vote for their own tributes), the 50th Games (the Second Quarter Quell, doubling the number of tributes per district, which is the setting of Sunrise on the Reaping), and the 75th Games (the Third Quarter Quell, reaping tributes from the existing pool of victors, which is the second half of Catching Fire).

What is the second Hunger Games book?

Catching Fire, published in 2009. It picks up after Katniss and Peeta’s win in the 74th Games and ends with them back in the arena for the 75th. If you’re asking because you’ve only read the first book and want to know what’s next, this is your answer, and there’s no prequel to read in between; Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping both come chronologically before The Hunger Games, not between it and Catching Fire.

Is there a Hunger Games book six?

Not as of this writing. Suzanne Collins has published five novels in the series, most recently Sunrise on the Reaping in March 2025. Neither Collins nor Scholastic has announced a sixth book, though the pattern of the last two prequels (a decade after the trilogy, then five years after that) suggests the series isn’t necessarily finished for good. Nothing beyond speculation exists right now.

Reading five books without losing the thread

The trilogy runs a fast, continuous story: read The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay back to back if you can, since Mockingjay in particular assumes you remember details from the previous book closely. The two prequels are more forgiving about gaps, since each is a self-contained story with its own cast, but they’re also easy to lose track of if you set one down for a few weeks and pick it back up cold.

That’s the part we built Moth for: log a session against each book as you go, and the app tracks your reading speed automatically from the pages you enter, so you have an actual number for how much of Mockingjay you have left. Five books at even 20 minutes a day is a manageable project once you can see the pace instead of guessing at it. If you want to time it against a release date, our guide to 2026’s book to movie adaptations has Sunrise on the Reaping’s film arriving November 20.

Start with The Hunger Games. The other four will still be there when you finish it.