The 2008 young adult dystopian novel by Suzanne Collins banned in some schools for its violence is The Hunger Games. It follows Katniss Everdeen, a teenager forced to compete in a televised fight to the death organized by the authoritarian Capitol.
Published on September 14, 2008, the novel became the first volume of a trilogy, followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Its violence is central to the story’s criticism of propaganda, inequality, and political control, but that same material has prompted challenges in schools and libraries.
The Hunger Games is sometimes confused with Divergent or The Maze Runner, two later young-adult dystopian series. Collins’s novel is specifically set in Panem, a fictional nation formed from a post-apocalyptic North America, and its annual Games are used to punish and intimidate the districts.