The Hunger Games: the story so far

Sixty-four years before Katniss, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow was the last of a ruined Capitol family keeping up appearances on cabbage soup. Mentoring a tribute in the tenth Hunger Games was his one route to the Plinth Prize and university, and he drew District 12: Lucy Gray Baird, a Covey singer who dropped a snake down a girl's dress at the reaping and sang to the cameras instead of crying.

He fed her, coached her and fell for her, and he pushed the Games towards the thing they would become, proposing betting and sponsor gifts to make people watch. Rebel bombs killed tributes and mentors in the arena before it started. Snow slipped Lucy Gray his mother's compact with rat poison inside it, and she won.

His friend Sejanus Plinth, a district boy bought into the Capitol, kept trying to stop all of it. Caught cheating with a handkerchief carrying Lucy Gray's scent to keep Dr Gaul's snakes off her, Snow took a twenty-year Peacekeeper contract in District 12 rather than be exposed. Sejanus followed and went on helping rebels, and Snow recorded his confession, sent it to Dr Gaul, and watched him hang for it.

Snow killed the mayor's daughter Mayfair Lipp to cover his own tracks, then found the murder weapon hidden in a cabin in the woods and understood that Lucy Gray knew what he had done to Sejanus. She walked into the trees. He fired into them, heard her voice somewhere in the branches, and never learned whether he hit her. Then he walked back, and Dr Gaul pardoned him and brought him home to the Capitol, having spent the whole book teaching him exactly what she wanted him to believe.

Twenty-four years before Katniss, Haymitch Abernathy turned sixteen on reaping day and expected to spend it running moonshine and seeing Lenore Dove Baird. The fiftieth Games were a Quarter Quell taking four tributes from every district instead of two. Haymitch was not drawn. He was conscripted on the spot when Woodbine Chance ran for it and was shot.

District 12's four were written off as long shots. Louella McCoy died when a chariot crashed during the parade, and Haymitch carried her body to the president's balcony, which earned him a private promise from Snow of a slow death. The Capitol propped a drugged girl from District 11 in her place, called her Lou Lou, and dared anyone to say otherwise.

Mags and Wiress mentored them. Beetee, forced to mentor his own son Ampert, brought Haymitch into a plan to blow open the arena's systems. The sabotage failed and Ampert died for it. Maysilee Donner, the sharp-tongued merchant's daughter, became Haymitch's ally and found the force field with him before mutt birds killed her. Silka, the last Career, swung an axe at Haymitch and it rebounded off the force field into her own skull.

The broadcast was cut to make him look like a lucky drunk rather than a boy who had tried to break the arena. Snow had his mother Willamae and his brother Sid killed and the house burned. Then Haymitch handed Lenore Dove gumdrops that Snow had swapped for poisoned ones, and she died in his arms making him promise to stop the Games. He went into the Victors' Village alone and started drinking.

Panem took two children from each of its twelve districts every year and made them kill each other on television. When Primrose Everdeen's name came out of the bowl, her sixteen-year-old sister Katniss volunteered in her place. District 12's boy was Peeta Mellark, the baker's son who had once given her bread. Their mentor was Haymitch Abernathy, drunk and the district's only living victor.

Peeta told the whole country he had been in love with Katniss for years. Haymitch told her to play along, because sponsors pay for star-crossed lovers. In the arena she ran, hid, and made an ally of Rue, a twelve-year-old from District 11 who reminded her of Prim. When Rue was speared, Katniss sang to her and covered her in flowers, and District 11 sent her bread for it.

The Gamemakers changed the rules so that two tributes from one district could win together. Katniss found Peeta half dead under a riverbank, nursed him, and played the romance hard enough to earn medicine, and stopped being certain how much of it she was playing.

With the two of them left alive, the rule was withdrawn. Rather than kill each other they each took a handful of nightlock berries and counted, and the Capitol stopped them a second before it lost both its victors. They went home crowned and safe. Haymitch warned Katniss that the Capitol had read the berries as defiance rather than love, and Peeta worked out on the train that most of the romance had been strategy.

President Snow came to Katniss's new house before the Victory Tour and told her plainly what the berries had cost. The districts had read them as rebellion. If she could not convince Panem she had done it out of love, her family and Gale would pay for it.

She could not. An old man in District 11 whistled Rue's tune and saluted her and was shot in front of her. Refugees from District 8 told her their district had risen, and that District 13 might not be ash after all. Gale was flogged in the square by a new Head Peacekeeper. The fence went live and District 12 was sealed.

The seventy-fifth Games were a Quarter Quell, and the card called for tributes drawn from living victors. Katniss was the only woman District 12 had. Peeta volunteered in Haymitch's place, then announced on live television that she was pregnant, and the Capitol audience turned.

The arena was a jungle laid out like a clock, every hour bringing its own way to die. Mags walked into poison fog to save Finnick. Wiress worked out the pattern and was killed for it. Beetee's plan was to run wire from the lightning tree down into the water, and Katniss instead fired that wire into the force field and brought the sky down.

She woke on a hovercraft. Plutarch Heavensbee had been running a rescue from inside the Games for a year, Haymitch and Finnick had been in on it, and District 13 was real and waiting for her. Peeta, Johanna and Enobaria had been taken by the Capitol instead. Gale told her District 12 no longer existed.

District 13 was underground, disciplined and run by President Alma Coin, who wanted Katniss on camera as the Mockingjay. Katniss agreed on the condition that Peeta and the other captured victors be pardoned whatever they did while in Capitol hands.

Studio propaganda was useless. What worked was sending her out: a bombed hospital in District 8, a speech she actually meant, the districts rising one after another. The Capitol answered by putting Peeta on air looking worse each week, until he warned District 13 of an incoming strike and the warning arrived in time to save them.

They pulled him out, and he tried to strangle her. He had been hijacked, tracker jacker venom laid over every memory of her until she was the monster in all of them. District 2 fell after Katniss talked down a crowd of miners and was shot on live television for it.

In the Capitol she went block by block through booby-trapped streets with a camera squad. Boggs died on a pod. Finnick was torn apart by lizard mutts in the sewers. At Snow's mansion, where Capitol children had been herded as a shield, a hovercraft dropped parachutes that looked like aid and killed them, then killed the medics who ran in. Prim was one of the medics.

Snow, caged and dying, told Katniss the bombs had been Coin's, built to the double-detonation design Gale and Beetee had drawn together. Coin then proposed one final Hunger Games using Capitol children. At the execution Katniss put her arrow through Coin instead, and the crowd killed Snow anyway. Acquitted as insane, she went home to District 12. Years later she and Peeta had two children who would one day ask what the meadow was.