Books like The Hunger Games
What should you read after Suzanne Collins’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Suzanne Collins
- 2009
- 387 pages
- Dystopian YA
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Hunger Games
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchDivergent
Veronica Roth
The closest structural cousin: a teenage girl choosing a faction, training among strangers, and discovering the whole sorting system is a lie. It wears its debt openly.
- Present-tense first-person urgency
- A girl who volunteers for her sister
- Districts starved by a capital
- Romance gets more airtime
Great matchThe Maze Runner
James Dashner
Teenagers dropped into a lethal arena by adults who watch and take notes. Strip Katniss's politics away and this is the pure survival engine underneath.
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- Televised death as entertainment
- Present-tense first-person urgency
- Almost no emotional interiority
Best for the system's crueltyThe Giver
Lois Lowry
Quieter, older, and the ancestor of this whole shelf: a comfortable society that has calmly decided which lives are disposable, and one boy who is told why.
- Districts starved by a capital
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- No action at all
Great matchRed Queen
Victoria Aveyard
A poor girl hauled into a glittering court, dressed, renamed and marketed to the public while a rebellion quietly uses her. The Capitol makeover, extended into a whole plot.
- Sponsors, styling and spin
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- Districts starved by a capital
- Heavy love-triangle content
Worth a look — with a warningThe Selection
Kiera Cass
The same machinery — girls chosen by lottery, filmed, styled and ranked for a national audience — except the prize is a crown rather than survival.
- Sponsors, styling and spin
- A romance performed for cameras
- Televised death as entertainment
- Romance is the entire point
Great matchLegend
Marie Lu
Two fifteen-year-olds on opposite sides of a rotten republic, one hunting the other. Lu matches Collins for pace and does the class divide with more teeth.
- Districts starved by a capital
- Present-tense first-person urgency
- A girl who volunteers for her sister
- Two narrators, less intimacy
Best for the games themselvesEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
Children trained by adults to fight a war they are never told the truth about, then made into a symbol. The moral hangover lands just as hard.
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- Televised death as entertainment
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- Military school, all-boys politics
Great matchThe 5th Wave
Rick Yancey
Opens with a girl alone in the woods with a rifle and a promise to her little brother, which is Katniss's exact emotional engine transplanted into an alien invasion.
- A girl who volunteers for her sister
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- Present-tense first-person urgency
- Alien invasion premise
Worth a look — with a warningThe Unwind Dystology
Neal Shusterman
Shusterman's society settled its argument by agreeing to harvest teenagers, and he refuses to soften it. If the Reaping made you angry, this is the strongest thing here.
- Districts starved by a capital
- Televised death as entertainment
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- One chapter is famously distressing
Great matchThe Lunar Chronicles
Fairy tales rebuilt as a war between Earth and a lunar empire, with a heroine who keeps refusing the role everyone hands her. Big, propulsive, ridiculously readable.
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- Districts starved by a capital
- A romance performed for cameras
- Fairy-tale retelling framing
Best for the deadly contestThe Scorpio Races
Maggie Stiefvater
An island race on carnivorous horses where people die every year and everyone turns up anyway. The ritual blood sport idea, told as something closer to folklore.
- A girl who volunteers for her sister
- Televised death as entertainment
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- Slow, atmospheric pacing
Great matchThe Darkest Minds
Alexandra Bracken
Children with powers rounded up into camps by their own government, and a girl who gets out and then has to work out who on the road is worth trusting.
- Districts starved by a capital
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- A girl who volunteers for her sister
- Superpowers change the stakes
Great matchThe City of Ember
Jeanne DuPrau
Two kids work out that the adults running their dying, rationed city have no plan at all. Gentler by a mile, but the same discovery sits at the centre.
- Districts starved by a capital
- Surviving on woodcraft and nerve
- A heroine who never wanted symbolism
- Middle-grade reading level
What should you read after The Hunger Games?
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Divergent by Veronica Roth — the closest structural cousin: a teenage girl choosing a faction, training among strangers, and discovering the whole sorting system is a lie. It wears its debt openly.
If what stayed with you was surviving on woodcraft and nerve, read The Maze Runner by James Dashner instead: teenagers dropped into a lethal arena by adults who watch and take notes. Strip Katniss's politics away and this is the pure survival engine underneath. The Giver by Lois Lowry is the other strong option — quieter, older, and the ancestor of this whole shelf: a comfortable society that has calmly decided which lives are disposable, and one boy who is told why.
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