Start with The White Mountains for a village that has agreed to be ruled, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe for a death turned into television, or The King Must Die, the novel Suzanne Collins says gave her the arena. None of the five books here is a recent dystopia, and four of them were written for adults. Last verified 1 October 2026.
Content note: Sunrise on the Reaping is about children made to kill each other, and it is sold in the UK for readers of thirteen and over. Most of the books below are older and written for adults, so each has its own reading-age line and content note.
AI-assisted desk research. Editorial contact: Alex, Highstreett founder.
What Highstreett returned for “I loved Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins for the way the Capitol uses the televised Games and its propaganda to keep people in line, and for the question of why so many go along with it. I want another book about spectacle, propaganda and submission, not just another young adult arena story. What should I read next?”
- Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Jacques Ellul (1962)
- 1984, George Orwell (2021)
- Battle Royale, Koushun Takami (1999)
- The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (2008)
- The Running Man, Stephen King (1982)
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953)
See this result · run 1 October 2026
Editor’s verdict: The 1 October run understood the question. Jacques Ellul's Propaganda is a real find for a reader asking why people go along, and Fahrenheit 451 is a fair answer on spectacle. But four of its six are the shelf this page set out to get past: The Hunger Games itself, Battle Royale, The Running Man and 1984, which it dated 2021, the year of the edition it found, when the novel was published in 1949. It returned none of the five below. Those six are its unedited result; the five below are our separate editorial picks.
Why these picks follow her sources, not the shelf
Suzanne Collins has been unusually open about where these books come from. In the interviews published on her own website she says Sunrise on the Reaping grew from David Hume’s idea of implicit submission, the puzzle of why the many let themselves be governed by the few, and that the title comes from Hume too. In an earlier interview she traces the Hunger Games to the myth of Theseus, to Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die, to the gladiator films of her childhood and Plutarch, and to an evening spent flicking between reality television and war coverage.
Only one of the five books below is one she has named: the Renault. The other four are our picks, older books that work the same seams she describes. We say so because a page that claimed she had read all five would be making it up.
We read thirteen lists in full on 1 October 2026. Nine were written for this novel: The Everygirl, Screen Rant, BookCrushin, a bookseller’s list on Bookshop.org, Khristina Chess and the automatic lists at Goodreads, SimilarBooks, ReadingList and bookdna. Four were written for The Hunger Games: Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Book Riot and Cosmopolitan. None of the five picks appears on any of them. The Everygirl’s page was read through its feed, which held 21 of the 24 books in its headline.
That is a finding about those thirteen pages, not a claim that nobody has made these connections. The White Mountains in particular has been called a forerunner of the Hunger Games before, by TIME in 2012 and by its own publisher in Australia.
If it was the reaping: a ritual nobody resists
Collins has said the book grew from David Hume's puzzle about how easily the many are governed by the few. The reaping is that puzzle as a ceremony: every year the districts line their children up. This is the novel that asked the same question of a village, forty years before Panem.
1. The White Mountains, John Christopher (1967)
Children's science fiction · short and fast · on none of the thirteen lists read
Tripods have ruled the Earth for generations, and people live quietly in villages under them. In their early teens every child is Capped: a metal mesh is fixed to the skull, and afterwards they are content and obedient. The village treats a Capping as a celebration. Will Parker, a year from his own, starts to notice what the Capped adults cannot, and runs for the mountains where free people are said to live. Nobody in his village is forced to accept the Tripods. They have been made to want to, which is exactly what Hume was asking about.
Differs: There is no arena in this book and no romance. It is brisk and plain, written for children in 1967, and it has almost no women or girls in it. It is the first of a trilogy; the second book sends its heroes to compete in Games whose winners are taken into the Tripods' city, which is as close as the series comes to Panem.
Reading age: 12 and up, by the publisher's own tag. It was written for children and is the one book here younger readers can pick up.
Content note: Mild peril. Dated in who gets to have the adventure.
Check the edition · Penguin (The Originals) UK paperback, 2017; 208 pages
If it was the cameras: suffering as television
Sunrise on the Reaping is a book about footage: what the Capitol films, what it cuts, and what the audience is allowed to believe. Collins has said the Hunger Games began with flicking between reality television and war coverage. Two writers got there before reality television existed.
2. The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, D.G. Compton (1974)
Adult science fiction · slow and sad · on none of the thirteen lists read
In a near future where almost nobody dies of illness, the few who do become television. Katherine Mortenhoe is told she has about four weeks to live, and a channel wants to broadcast them. She refuses and runs. The reporter sent after her has cameras implanted behind his eyes, so everything he looks at is the programme, and she does not know. It is the Capitol's audience seen from the inside: a public that calls its appetite for someone else's death compassion.
Differs: Nobody rebels and nobody fights. It is a slow, bleak, adult novel about one woman's last weeks and the man filming them. In America it was first published as The Unsleeping Eye, and it was filmed in 1980 as Death Watch.
Reading age: Adult. Nothing in it is unsuitable for an older teenager, but it is a quiet novel about dying and was not written for them.
Content note: Terminal illness and dying are the whole subject.
Check the edition · Gollancz SF Masterworks UK paperback, 2012; 256 pages
The Prize of PerilRobert Sheckley
3. The Prize of Peril, Robert Sheckley (1958)
Short story · satire · on none of the thirteen lists read
Jim Raeder is an ordinary man who has worked his way up through televised thrill shows to the biggest of them, in which hired killers hunt him while viewers at home ring in to help him or to give him away. It was published in 1958, filmed in West Germany in 1970 and in France in 1983, and followed twenty-four years later by Stephen King's The Running Man. Read it for the audience, who are kind, ordinary and enjoying themselves.
Differs: It is a satire and a short one, with none of Haymitch's grief in it. It is also awkward to buy. No book published in Britain has it in print, so the route is an American anthology that UK bookshops will order in.
Reading age: Adult magazine science fiction, and short. Fine for a teenager who liked the Games chapters.
Content note: A man is hunted for entertainment; the violence is brief.
Check the edition · A short story, in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 (Tachyon, US paperback, 2014, ISBN 9781616961633). No UK book in print contains it
If it was the tributes: where the arena comes from
Collins has named the myth of Theseus, in which Athens sends seven boys and seven girls to Crete, and the gladiator stories of her childhood. These are the novels of both. One of them she has cited by name.
4. The King Must Die, Mary Renault (1958)
Historical novel · the book Collins names · on none of the thirteen lists read
The Theseus story told as if it happened. Athens owes Crete a tribute of young people, Theseus goes with them, and at Knossos they are trained as bull-dancers for the court's entertainment in a place called the Bull Court. He turns his fourteen into a team who swear to keep one another alive. Collins has said this was the book that turned the labyrinth into an arena for her. If you want to see where tributes, a decadent capital and a team that refuses to play as individuals come from, it is here.
Differs: The Bull Court is the second half. The first is Theseus growing up, and the novel cares as much about kingship and sacrifice as about the ring. It is an adult book from 1958, with that decade's ideas about men and women.
Reading age: Adult historical fiction with sex and killing in it. Collins says she read it in her teens.
Content note: Animal and human deaths in the ring, ritual killing, and sex, none of it lingering.
Check the edition · Virago Modern Classics UK paperback, 2025; 416 pages
5. The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler (1939)
Political novel · heavy going · on none of the thirteen lists read
The slave revolt of Spartacus, told as a novel about what happens after the breakout. Gladiators escape their school at Capua, become an army of slaves and found a city run on rules of their own, and it goes wrong. Collins has named the Spartacus story as the arc behind the Hunger Games. Sunrise on the Reaping is the version in which the rising fails, and Koestler spends a whole novel on why risings do.
Differs: It is Koestler's first novel, the start of a trilogy on revolution that continues with Darkness at Noon, and it is about ideas more than people. There are no teenagers in it. It is also not the source of the 1960 film Spartacus, which was taken from a different novel, by Howard Fast.
Reading age: Adult, and the hardest read here. For the reader who finished Sunrise on the Reaping asking why the rebellion failed.
Content note: War, mass executions and crucifixion.
Check the edition · Vintage Classics UK paperback, 1999; 320 pages; translated by Edith Simon
The source itself, and it is free
The passage Collins prints at the front of the novel is the opening of David Hume’s essay Of the First Principles of Government, first published in 1741. It runs to about five pages, and its argument is the one the novel dramatises: force is always on the side of the governed, so rulers have nothing to hold them up but opinion. You can read it free at Hume Texts Online, or in the Oxford World’s Classics Selected Essays if you want it on paper.
The novel’s other Hume epigraph, the one about the sun not rising tomorrow, is from a different book, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. That is where the title comes from.
The honest bit
The biggest mismatch is who these books were written for. Sunrise on the Reaping is a young adult novel that moves fast. Only The White Mountains was written for young readers, and it is aimed slightly younger. The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and The Gladiators are slow adult novels, and a reader who wants another arena will not find one in either. The arena is in the second half of The King Must Die and in The Prize of Peril, which is a short story and has to be ordered from America.
If what you want is the same speed and the same age range, you have probably already been handed the rest of the Hunger Games books, Battle Royale, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Red Rising and Chain-Gang All-Stars. They are on the lists linked above, and we left them out on purpose.
Questions
Book search takes the request in your own words, so you can tell it whether it was the reaping, the cameras or the failed rebellion that you want more of.
Search for your next book
If Hume’s question is the part that stayed with you, our 12 books in your first term page is a reading list on where authority comes from, and includes Orwell’s essays and Hannah Arendt on obedience. For propaganda as a profession, see Best books about the Cold War.
