The Hunger Games

Every year, in the ruins of a nation once called North America, the Capitol forces each of its twelve subjugated districts to send one boy and one girl into the Hunger Games — a televised fight to the death staged as both entertainment and a reminder of the Capitol's absolute power. When her twelve-year-old sister Primrose is chosen, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her place, entering an arena where twenty-four tributes are set against one another and only one is meant to survive.

Hardened by years of illegally hunting to keep her family fed, Katniss is a formidable competitor, but staying alive in the arena demands more than skill with a bow.

Alongside Peeta Mellark, the baker's son from her own district, she has to win the sympathy of sponsors and the watching audience — which means performing a story of star-crossed love that may or may not be real.

As the Games grow crueler and the Capitol's rules shift beneath her, Katniss's choices begin to look less like survival and more like defiance.

The first book in Suzanne Collins's landmark dystopian trilogy is a taut, first-person survival story and a pointed examination of spectacle, inequality, and the price of rebellion.