There’s a New ‘Hunger Games’ Novel. Here’s What You Need to Know.

Nearly 20 years ago, Suzanne Collins published “The Hunger Games,” a dystopian novel about a young woman forced to compete against other adolescents in a fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses.

That book was a smash, spawning two more — “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay” — about Katniss Everdeen, plus a prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” about the series’s villain, President Coriolanus Snow. Now Collins is back with another prequel, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” about Katniss’s mentor, Haymitch Abernathy. The book comes out March 18.

With five books and four movies to keep track of, you’d be forgiven for forgetting some details of the “Hunger Games” world. Here’s what you need to know before reading “Sunrise on the Reaping.”

What is Panem?

Panem is a fictionalized, future version of the United States. People in the country’s 12 districts, which loosely correspond to regions of the U.S., toil to supply resources to the Capitol, where the rich and powerful live. (“In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia,” Katniss says in “The Hunger Games.”)

In the poorest district, 12, people regularly starve to death or die in coal mining accidents. Capitol citizens, on the other hand, are so wealthy that some people take tonics to make themselves throw up so they can feast on even more food. They are known for their outlandish fashion and are waited on by avoxes, enslaved people who have had their tongues cut out as punishment for treason.