NEW YORK >> Savannah Miller, 26 years old and a “Hunger Games” reader for half of her life, has only grown in admiration for Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novels.

“As a kid you focus so much on the plot and the action,” says Miller, a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and among hundreds of fans at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square who attended the midnight launch party for “Sunrise on the Reaping,” published Tuesday. “As an adult I connected to the characters a lot more and had more of an emotional response. I also appreciated the writing a lot.”

“Hunger Games” fans gathered in bookstores around the world for celebrations of Collins fifth novel in her blockbuster series about a post-apocalyptic society in which combatants are forced to fight on camera for their survival.

Many arrivals Monday night were women in their 20s and 30s who had loved the books in middle school and renewed their attachment when Collins unexpectedly resumed the novels five years ago.

“I’ve been reading the books since I was 12,” says 23-year-old actor Ella Dolynchuk. “It’s a big part of my life, my childhood, and I love reading them as an adult when I can really understand them.”

“Sunrise on the Reaping” had already reached No. 1 on Amazon before its publication and is widely expected to be one of the year’s biggest fiction sellers. According to Scholastic Inc., the four previous books have sold tens of millions of copies and have been published in 55 languages.

Film adaptations helped launch the career of Jennifer Lawrence, who starred as the heroine Katniss Everdeen in the movies based on the first three books, and have grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. A screen version of “Sunrise on the Reaping” is scheduled for November 2026, with Francis Lawrence returning as director.

Collins had planned to end the series after the third book, “Mockingjay,” which came out in 2010. But she startled readers and the publishing world by announcing a decade later that she was working on a fourth volume, the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”