Eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow knows he has to make a good showing as a mentor in this year’s Hunger Games, a televised gladiator-style fight to the death among 24 children from Panem’s districts. It’s supposed to punish the districts for rebelling against the Capitol years ago and instigating a devastating war. Coriolanus’s parents died and the family lost its munitions empire during the war, so he needs to do well in the Games and win a cash prize that will pay his tuition at the University in the fall. But Coriolanus ends up stuck with the female tribute from the poorest district, District 12. As he watches District 12’s reaping on television, though, he wonders if his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, is actually a fighter—she puts a snake down the mayor’s daughter’s dress and sings a compelling song. Dean Highbottom, a morphling addict who hates Coriolanus for some unknown reason, taunts Coriolanus about his assignment.
Coriolanus and his older cousin, Tigris, decide Coriolanus has to earn Lucy Gray’s trust, so he meets her at the train platform with a rose from Grandma’am’s rooftop rose garden. Things don’t go according to plan: Coriolanus ends up riding in a cage on the back of a truck, which dumps Coriolanus and the 24 tributes into the monkey house at the zoo. He gets in trouble for this. Over the next several days, Coriolanus and the other 23 mentors have regular classes with Dr. Gaul, the Head Gamemaker. At the same time, the mentors realize the Capitol isn’t feeding the tributes. Coriolanus and a classmate named Sejanus start bringing the tributes food. Sejanus is originally from District Two, but his father Strabo Plinth is a munitions magnate and bought the family’s life in the Capitol. Sejanus’s tribute, Marcus, is a former classmate of his from District Two, and he won’t accept Sejanus’s offers. Coriolanus dislikes Sejanus, but as they spend more time together, others assume Coriolanus and Sejanus are best friends.
On the day that Dr. Gaul assigns the mentors a group proposal for how to make the Games more interesting, a mentor named Arachne teases her tribute with food—and the tribute slits Arachne’s throat. Peacekeepers shoot the tribute. Coriolanus’s classmates are too distraught to work on the assignment, so Coriolanus does it himself. The next day, Dr. Gaul calls Coriolanus and Clemensia (the other person who was supposed to write the proposal) to her lab at the Citadel to discuss the proposal. Clemensia and Coriolanus lie that they both worked on it. Dr. Gaul asks them to fetch their proposal from a tank of technicolor snakes—who, she explains as Clemensia reaches in, will bite people whose scent they’re unfamiliar with. The snakes bite Clemensia, landing her in the hospital for days.
Coriolanus is charged with singing Panem’s national anthem at Arachne’s funeral. As part of the funeral procession, the body of the tribute who killed Arachne is hung from a crane and paraded down the street. Over the next few days, the mentors meet with their tributes to prep them for TV interviews. One afternoon, the mentors and tributes tour the Games arena, an old sporting stadium. While they’re walking around, bombs go off. Lucy Gray saves Coriolanus from a burning beam. The mentors who survive (two die) are taken to the hospital; a vet tends to the injured tributes. Several more tributes die in the blast or right after—and Marcus escapes.
Only a few tributes are willing to participate in the TV interview after this. Coriolanus and Lucy Gray decide that she should sing. She sings a haunting, beautiful love song—but Coriolanus is extremely jealous, since it’s not about him. Dr. Gaul has put several of Coriolanus’s proposals into practice, such as betting and allowing spectators to pay for food for the tributes. The night before the games start, Coriolanus gives Lucy Gray his mother’s compact, which she plans to fill with rat poison. They kiss passionately.
Finally, the Games begin. After the tributes are released into the arena, the camera pans to where Marcus—still alive—hangs from his wrists. Another tribute kills him. That night, Coriolanus gets home from watching the Games at school to find Ma Plinth, Sejanus’s mother, at his apartment. Sejanus is missing. But when she turns to the Snows’ television, she sees Sejanus’s silhouette on the screen. Dr. Gaul summons Coriolanus and Mrs. Plinth to the arena, where she forces Coriolanus to sneak in and get Sejanus out. Sejanus doesn’t want to leave (he’d like to make a statement about how wrong the Games are), but he agrees to follow Coriolanus. Coriolanus and Sejanus barely make it out alive as tributes pursue them—and Coriolanus ends up murdering a tribute named Bobbin. Later, Dr. Gaul insists that what Coriolanus experienced in the arena is humanity in its true form—humans are naturally violent.
When Coriolanus returns to Dr. Gaul’s lab a few days later, he suspects that she’s going to dump her technicolor snakes into the arena. Wanting to protect Lucy Gray, Coriolanus drops a handkerchief she used into the snakes’ tank so they’ll be familiar with her scent. Sure enough, the snakes kill several tributes—but not Lucy Gray. After several days, more tributes die. Jessup succumbs to rabies, and Lucy Gray poisons a few with rat poison. She ultimately wins. Coriolanus is ecstatic until Dean Highbottom presents him with his mother’s compact and the handkerchief from the snake tank—evidence that he cheated. He forces Coriolanus to sign up for the Peacekeepers.
Coriolanus asks to serve in District 12, hoping he’ll be able to find Lucy Gray. A week later, Sejanus arrives in 12. Strabo agreed to pay for a new gym and a new lab for Dr. Gaul in exchange for letting Sejanus graduate and join the Peacekeepers, rather than be charged for his antics during the Games. Sejanus also insisted Coriolanus be allowed to graduate. This is great for Coriolanus: with a diploma, he can train to be an officer and become a military commander, like his father Crassus Snow.
Over the next week, Coriolanus and Sejanus attend the hanging of a local rebel who bombed the mines. Coriolanus is disturbed when the jabberjays (some of Dr. Gaul’s creations, birds who can record human speech and were used as surveillance devices during the war) and mockingjays (jabberjays’ offspring with mockingbirds, who can only sing) turn the dead man’s last words into a macabre song. The following night, Coriolanus, Sejanus, and their bunkmates go to the local bar, the Hob, to see Lucy Gray and her band, the Covey, perform. Coriolanus only reveals himself to Lucy Gray at the end of the show—but before they can embrace, a drunk young man named Billy Taupe shows up. He’s clearly Lucy Gray’s former lover, and with him is his new girlfriend Mayfair, the mayor’s daughter. As the lights go out, a brawl breaks out.
The next day, Coriolanus and Sejanus visit the Covey. Coriolanus and Lucy Gray kiss and share how things have been since they last spoke. When they return to the house, though, they find Sejanus talking with Billy Taupe in the yard. Billy Taupe is drawing a map and giving directions. Over the next several weeks, Sejanus becomes increasingly despondent—he wants to make life better in the districts, not shoot the people who live there. Coriolanus discovers Sejanus has a stash of cash and is possibly buying weapons for rebels.
Coriolanus and Sejanus spend several afternoons helping scientists from Dr. Gaul’s lab trap jabberjays and mockingjays for study. Coriolanus learns how to record with the jabberjays and, when he’s assigned to care for the birds, enjoys playing with them. One afternoon, as Coriolanus is getting the jabberjays ready to go to the Capitol, Sejanus shares that he’s planning to escape with the rebels. Coriolanus sneakily records Sejanus with a jabberjay; hopefully, Dr. Gaul will hear it.
In the middle of the Covey’s show at the Hob the next weekend, Coriolanus follows Sejanus when Sejanus slips into the garage behind the Hob. There, Coriolanus and Lucy Gray—who follows Coriolanus—discover Sejanus, Billy Taupe, and a rebel named Spruce with a bag of weapons, plotting their escape. Mayfair appears and threatens to tell, so Coriolanus shoots her. Spruce shoots Billy Taupe.
A few days later, officers arrest Sejanus for treason, but not for his involvement in Billy Taupe and Mayfair’s murders. Coriolanus attends Sejanus’s hanging, expecting any day to face execution himself—he’s certain someone will discover he shot Mayfair, especially when Spruce dies in the base medical clinic of mysterious injuries. When the Covey plays at Commander Hoff’s birthday celebration several days later, Coriolanus and Lucy Gray have a chance to talk. Mayor Lipp believes Lucy Gray killed Mayfair and is threatening her, so she and Coriolanus decide to run away together. She sings a song called “The Hanging Tree” about the rebel’s hanging, as well as one about a lover who’s “pure as the driven snow”—clearly, Coriolanus.
The morning Coriolanus plans to leave with Lucy Gray, Commander Hoff informs him that he passed the officer test and will leave for an elite training program the next day. Coriolanus still goes to meet Lucy Gray. But as they travel, he realizes that trying to survive is depressing, and he hates nature. When he discovers Spruce’s cache of guns—including the gun Coriolanus used to kill Mayfair—Coriolanus decides to destroy the weapon and return to base. But first, he has to talk to Lucy Gray, since she knows too much and could damage his reputation. Lucy Gray now knows that Coriolanus is responsible for Sejanus’s death, so she runs into the woods. Coriolanus hunts her. He walks right into a trap she set and gets bitten by a snake. He then fires into the woods when he hears her sing. Coriolanus doesn’t know if he hit her, but he decides it doesn’t matter. He sinks the weapons in a lake, returns to the base, and leaves the next day. The hovercraft takes him to the Capitol, where Dr. Gaul informs him that his stint in 12 was just a vacation. He’ll study under her at the University.
Several months later, Coriolanus now goes by his last name, Snow. Strabo Plinth has named him the heir to his munitions empire, which will save the Snows’ reputation. Snow doesn’t know what happened to Lucy Gray and doesn’t care. On his way home one night, he stops at Dean Highbottom’s office with Sejanus’s box of personal effects from his Peacekeeping days. Snow throws away some of Sejanus’s medications, including a bottle of morphling, into Dean Highbottom’s trash. Highbottom reveals why he hates Coriolanus: he and Crassus Snow were friends as students, and Crassus was the one who wrote down Highbottom’s drunken idea—the Hunger Games—and submitted the proposal to Dr. Gaul. Crassus cared about his grade, not human life or decency. This is also why Highbottom turned to morphling; it helps him cope with the fact that he’s credited with such a cruel idea. Coriolanus is unperturbed. He poisoned the morphling bottle now in Highbottom’s trash with rat poison. When Highbottom inevitably takes the poisoned morphling, he’ll have to admit that Snow always wins.
