Sunrise on the Reaping Explained: What to Know Before You Watch, and How Haymitch Won

What is Sunrise on the Reaping about?

It’s the story of how Haymitch Abernathy, Katniss’s mentor, became a victor. Suzanne Collins’s fifth Hunger Games novel, published on March 18, 2025, follows him from the morning of his 16th birthday, which is also reaping day in District 12, through the 50th Hunger Games.

You know Haymitch from the original trilogy as the drunk who falls off the reaping stage. This book shows him at 16: a kid from the Seam doing odd jobs for his widowed mother and his little brother, Sid, and spending every spare hour with his girlfriend, Lenore Dove. A central question is why people go along with the Games at all: Collins has said the book grew out of David Hume’s writing on how easily the many are governed by the few, and that it digs into propaganda and who controls the story.

When is Sunrise on the Reaping set?

24 years before The Hunger Games, at the 50th Hunger Games. That makes it the second prequel: it sits between The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, set at the 10th Games, and Katniss’s 74th. No real-world calendar year is given for any of it.

Is the new Hunger Games movie about Haymitch?

Yes. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping adapts the novel, so it’s Haymitch’s story. Directed by Francis Lawrence, it opens in US theatres on November 20, 2026. This guide is written from the book; it won’t guess what the film keeps or changes.

Do you need to read or watch the others first?

No. Sunrise on the Reaping explains its own world, and the original trilogy already tells you that Haymitch wins, so the headline result is no surprise. How he won, and what it cost him, is only in this book. But it lands harder if you know the trilogy: much of its weight comes from what you already know about Haymitch, Katniss, the mockingjay pin and the man who becomes President Snow.

Where does it fit in the Hunger Games order?

Story order and release order are different. If you want to go in story order, start with Ballad; if you want the reveals as readers got them, go by release date.

Story order	Book (published)	Film (US release)	Set during
1	The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020)	The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)	10th Hunger Games
2	Sunrise on the Reaping (2025)	Sunrise on the Reaping (Nov 20, 2026)	50th Hunger Games
3	The Hunger Games (2008)	The Hunger Games (2012)	74th Hunger Games
4	Catching Fire (2009)	Catching Fire (2013)	75th Hunger Games
5	Mockingjay (2010)	Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and Part 2 (2015)	The Second Rebellion

What was special about the 50th Hunger Games?

It was a Quarter Quell, so it doubled the number of children sent in: every district had to reap two girls and two boys instead of one of each, 48 tributes in all. A Quarter Quell came every 25 years with a twist on who was sent into the arena. President Snow read the 50th’s twist from a card, framing it as a reminder that two rebels had died for every Capitol citizen in the uprising. For the other two Quells (the 25th, when districts voted on their tributes, and the 75th in Catching Fire), see our guide to every Quarter Quell.

Haymitch’s district, District 12, had produced only one victor in the Games’ first half century, forty years earlier, and had no living victor to mentor its four tributes.

Who is Maysilee Donner?

Maysilee Donner is one of District 12’s two girl tributes in the 50th Games, reaped alongside Haymitch. She’s the daughter of the family that runs the town sweetshop, the twin sister of Merrilee (who later marries the mayor), and so the aunt of Madge Undersee, born years later. The book’s own blurb sets her up as the most stuck-up girl in town, and she and Haymitch can’t stand each other at the start; she used to call him “itchy itchy Haymitchy”.

She’s also the original owner of the mockingjay pin. In the books, Madge gives it to Katniss before the 74th Games; the first film changed where Katniss gets it. Readers first met Maysilee’s name in Catching Fire, when Katniss’s mother mentions a friend who went into the arena that year.

Is Katniss in Sunrise on the Reaping?

Not as a character in the main story. She isn’t born yet when it takes place: she’s born about eight years later, shortly before the 58th Games. Anything more is below the spoiler line.

---

Spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping below. Everything past this line comes from the book, ending included. Nothing here describes the film.

Why was Haymitch reaped?

His name was never drawn. District 12’s four tributes were called as usual: Louella McCoy, Maysilee Donner, Wyatt Callow and Woodbine Chance. Woodbine ran for an alley and was shot dead from the roof of the Justice Building. When Lenore Dove went to help his mother, Haymitch stepped in to protect her, and the escort, Drusilla Sickle, picked him as Woodbine’s replacement. He was never drawn from the ball: the escort simply chose him, on his 16th birthday, with twenty slips of his own already in the ball (how the reaping works).

The broadcast version of the reaping was heavily edited too, a first sign of the book’s theme: the Capitol decides what Panem sees.

How did Haymitch win the 50th Hunger Games?

He turned the arena’s force field into a weapon. The arena was beautiful and almost entirely poisonous; only rainwater and Cornucopia food were safe. With Maysilee he reached its edge, a cliff above the generator, and found that the invisible force field threw back anything that hit it.

When only he and Silka Sharp of District 1 were left, she wounded him badly in an axe fight. At the cliff she threw her axe at his head; he collapsed, it sailed over the edge, and she thought she could simply outlast him. The force field threw the axe back into her. With his last strength he threw a final bomb at the generator; Plutarch Heavensbee later said the blast shook the Capitol.

That bomb was the end of a plot, not a fluke. Beetee Latier, whose 12-year-old son Ampert had been reaped as punishment, had planned for Haymitch, with Ampert’s help, to bomb the water tank under the arena. Ampert brought the fuse and the bombs; Haymitch went down alone and planted the charge. The arena glitched and was damaged, but the plan didn’t bring it down.

Who dies in Sunrise on the Reaping?

All of District 12’s other tributes, and most of Haymitch’s friends in the arena:

• Woodbine Chance, shot at the reaping.
• Louella McCoy, 13, his neighbour, killed when their chariot crashed at the Tribute Parade. The Capitol hid her death with a body double the tributes called Lou Lou, who later died in the arena.
• Wyatt Callow, killed in the bloodbath while shielding Lou Lou. Eighteen of the 48 died there, the deadliest bloodbath in the Games’ history.
• Ampert Latier, killed by squirrel mutts sent after him alone.
• Maysilee Donner, Haymitch’s ally after she saved his life with a poison dart. They had agreed to be brother and sister. With five tributes left she broke off the alliance, changed her mind, and went to fetch their food. Mutt birds programmed to target only her attacked, and ignored Haymitch when he ran to fight them off. Haymitch held her hand as she died, and a sponsor sent him strawberry ice cream and black coffee, apparently meant to remind him of her.
• Wellie, a small, starving girl from District 6 whom Haymitch was trying to make the victor, killed by Silka.

Because Woodbine and Louella were both replaced, District 12 had six tributes chosen in one year, which makes the 50th technically a Games of 50 children rather than 48.

What happens to Lenore Dove and Haymitch’s family?

Snow kills them within two weeks of his victory. The force-field trick made the Capitol look foolish. Haymitch came home in August to find his house burning with his mother and Sid inside; Burdock Everdeen held him back. Lenore Dove, out on house arrest, met him in the Meadow with a second bag of gumdrops she thought he had sent. They were blood red, the colour of Snow’s rose, and poisoned. Her last words made him promise not to let the sun rise on another reaping. District 12 was told she died of appendicitis.

After that Haymitch pushed everyone away so no one else could be used against him, and started drinking. He mentored District 12 alone for 23 years and lost all 46 tributes before Katniss and Peeta.

Did Haymitch know Katniss’s dad?

Yes, they were childhood friends. Burdock Everdeen took Haymitch under the fence into the woods for the first time when they were ten, and on that trip introduced him to Lenore Dove, Burdock’s distant cousin. Burdock is the one who kept him out of the fire, and he and Asterid, Katniss’s future mother, stood by Haymitch longest, until he drove them off too. So Katniss is distantly related to Lenore Dove, and the Everdeens are said to be linked to her people, the Covey, though the exact link is never spelled out.

Why did the Capitol edit Haymitch’s Games?

To erase every act of rebellion. The televised version cut the parade crash, played down the Newcomers alliance, removed Ampert and the bombing, the Gamemakers killed in the arena and Snow’s poisoned milk, and made Haymitch look like a selfish loner who abandoned his allies. That edit is the recap Katniss and Peeta watch in Catching Fire, where Katniss decides the force-field trick was nearly as bad as her berries. Sunrise reveals the recap was propaganda.

Why did Haymitch vote for another Hunger Games?

In Mockingjay, the seven surviving victors vote on President Coin’s proposal for one last Games with Capitol children. The vote splits three to three and Haymitch breaks the tie by siding with Katniss: yes. Katniss takes it as proof of how alike they are. Sunrise doesn’t change what happened, but it shows what the reaping took from him, and that he had spent more than two decades holding on to Lenore Dove’s promise. The Games were abolished soon after.

More from Panem on the Hunger Games world page.