Star Wars The High Republic - Light of the Jedi

Light of the Jedi is a novel by the American writer Charles Soule, published in 2021 by Del Rey. It is the first novel of the Star Wars: The High Republic project, and it is set about two hundred years before the events of The Phantom Menace.

The High Republic of the book is a period of expansion rather than war. Scouting ships are charting new routes, the Senate is governing a growing number of worlds, and the Jedi Order is preparing to open the Starlight Beacon, a station built to keep distant parts of the Republic in contact with each other. The catastrophe that the book is named for comes from a group called the Nihil, whose interference with a hyperspace route causes a ship called the Legacy Run to break apart in transit. Its fragments emerge at different places and different times, striking inhabited systems and killing thousands, and the Jedi who respond, among them Avar Kriss, have to work out how to reach the survivors in the Hetzal System and what has begun to happen out on the frontier.

The novel introduces a large cast of Jedi, pilots and officials, and it is the first part of a story that continues across other novels and comics in the same publishing programme.