The Hunger Games prequels

Suzanne Collins's two Hunger Games prequels reach back before the original trilogy to trace how Panem's culture of manufactured cruelty took shape. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) is set 64 years earlier and follows a teenage Coriolanus Snow mentoring a tribute in an early, still-evolving version of the Games, tracing the ambition that eventually makes him the trilogy's tyrant president. Sunrise on the Reaping (2025) moves to a later Games, revisiting the brutal victory of Haymitch Abernathy referenced only briefly in the original books.