Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens brought the franchise back to the big screen in 2015, and while it's largely a great starting point for what turned out to be a divisive trilogy, there has since been a great novel with a storyline that would have been a far better first installment for the sequels. It was published in 2022, and it's a cover-to-cover masterpiece.
The 2023 announcement of Daisy Ridley's upcoming Star Wars movie is the space opera's first proper on-screen visit to the sequel era since 2019's Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker. However, stories set around that period have already been told in books, comics, and other media. These additional adventures have managed to make the sequel era retroactively better, and one effort from 2022 stands out particularly well for how awesome it is.
Shadow of the Sith tells an amazing Luke and Lando story set just before The Force Awakens
Written by Adam Christopher, Shadow of the Sith is the successful coming together of old and new in a way that the Star Wars sequel trilogy never quite managed. Its main story revolves around Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian before the rise of the First Order, roughly 15 years before the events of The Force Awakens.
As what feels like a well-told, bonus plotline, Shadow of the Sith also features a young Rey and her enigmatic parents. The two stories intertwine to create a signature Star Wars adventure that so perfectly blends high stakes with character-driven drama. Plus, it places franchise legends front and center instead of using them as window dressing.
Shadow of the Sith made me care about elements of the sequel trilogy that I once found trivial and/or uninteresting, while also serving as a much-needed canonical catch-up with Luke and Lando in the years that followed the Rebellion's victory over the Empire in 1983's Return of the Jedi. Even if you hate the sequels — and I'm not too fond of them — you will adore Shadow of the Sith.
The awkward truth of how Shadow of the Sith turned out so well
While I maintain that the sequel trilogy would have been vastly superior if it had started with a Shadow of the Sith movie, such a thing was never a possibility. The book was published three years after the trilogy ended, and it was written as a prequel to the sequels, taking all the new lore into account. As such, Shadow of the Sith exists BECAUSE of the sequels, not in spite of them.
So, if you read and enjoy the 2022 novel, you also need to be grateful for The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker. The book does function well as its own self-contained story, but it also feels as though Adam Christopher has written Shadow of the Sith as a redemptive setup for the Star Wars sequel trilogy.