'Sunrise' arrives at midnight for fans celebrating release of new 'Hunger Games' novel

NEW YORK (AP) — Savannah Miller, 26 years old and a “Hunger Games” reader for half of her life, has only grown in admiration for Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novels.

“As a kid you focus so much on the plot and the action,” says Miller, a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and among hundreds of fans at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan's Union Square who attended the midnight launch party for published 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” fans gathered in bookstores around the world for celebrations of Collins fifth novel in her blockbuster series about a post-apocalyptic society in which combatants are forced to fight on camera for their survival. Attendees in New York — some dressed as Haymitch Abernathy, Effie Trinket and other characters — went on scavenger hunts, attempted to solve “Hunger Games”-themed puzzles and tried out a “Hunger Games” trivia game so challenging that even Collins' editor, David Levithan, said he couldn't answer them all.

Fans who fell in love with series as children continue attachment

Many arrivals Monday night were women in their 20s and 30s who had loved the books in middle school and renewed their attachment when Collins unexpectedly resumed the novels five years ago.

“I've been reading the books since I was 12," says 23-year-old actor Ella Dolynchuk. “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 before its publication and is widely expected to be one of the year's biggest fiction sellers. Although the book was embargoed before its official sales date, gleeful fans were posting videos on social media in recent days that showed off advanced copies apparently shipped too early or prematurely placed on shelves, including at Los Angeles Airport, a Sam's Club in California and an Indigo bookstore in Canada.

According to Scholastic Inc., the four previous books have sold tens of millions of copies and have been published in 55 languages. Film adaptations helped launch the career of who starred as the heroine Katniss Everdeen in the movies based on the first three books, and have grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. A screen version of “Sunrise on the Reaping” is scheduled for November 2026, with Francis Lawrence returning as director.

Collins had planned to end the series after the third book, “Mockinjay,” which came out in 2010. But she startled readers and the publishing world by announcing a decade later that , the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes." Levithan was among those who had not suspected that Collins was returning to the ravaged land of Panem.

“She decides and then she springs it on me,” Levithan said Monday night at the Barnes & Noble launch. “We had never talked about prequels. The trilogy was the trilogy, and then she realized she had more to say.”

‘Sunrise’ takes place 24 years before first novel

The new book begins at sunrise, with the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games. It's set 24 years before the original “Hunger Games” novel, which came out in 2008, and 40 years after “Songbirds and Snakes.” Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman gladiator games for her earlier books. For “Sunrise on the Reaping,” her muses included the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher 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 did not attend the Barnes & Noble event and rarely gives interviews, said in a statement released when the new book was announced. “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.”

“Sunrise” centers on a teenage Haymitch, who will age into Katniss' sardonic, alcoholic mentor, and includes references to various other characters and subplots in previous books. New York Times reviewer Jennifer Harlan on Tuesday called the novel a “propulsive, heart-wrenching addition” to the series that adds ”welcome texture to the cruel world of Panem." People magazine's Lizz Schumer noted some passages could be seen as references to current events, including “If you can get people to laugh at someone, it makes them look weak.”

On Monday, lines began to form four hours before the store's doors opened: 34-year-old Elizabeth Kelly was among the first to arrive. She thinks of the series as her “comfort books,” while also calling them “survival stories that feel more and more relevant."

“It takes a lot of imagination to expand a world and say something new every time,” she said. “I feel like she's writing the books to tell us something and not just writing books to make money.”