The Malazan Book of the Fallen is an epic fantasy series written by Canadian author Steven Erikson, published in ten volumes beginning with the novel Gardens of the Moon, published in 1999. The series was completed with the publication of The Crippled God in February 2011. Erikson's series is complex with a wide scope, and presents the narratives of a large cast of characters. Erikson's plotting presents a complicated series of events in the world upon which the Malazan Empire is located. Each volume is relatively self-contained for the first five novels, in that the primary conflict of each novel is resolved within that novel. However, many underlying characters and events are interwoven throughout the works of the series, binding it together.
In The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him — something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn't she killed by the germ like all the females on New World?
Propelled by Todd's gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.
The Hunger Games is set in an unspecified future time when things have gone pretty spectacularly badly for humanity. The world, or the bit of it we can see, is dominated by a ruling caste who live in luxury in a city called the Capitol. The rest live like peasants in 12 districts that are strictly cordoned off from the Capitol and one another. Life in the districts sucks: it's mostly hard labor--mining coal and farming and working in factories--in dismal conditions.