The High Republic is the most deliberately structured publishing project Star Wars has ever run, and it is also the one most often read in the wrong order. The confusion has a specific cause: the phases were published in the order 1, 2, 3, but in the fiction they run 2, 1, 3, with a hundred and fifty years between the first two.
The frame
Lucasfilm announced the initiative on 24 February 2020 as a publishing-led project unconnected to any film then in development. The first book slipped from an original August 2020 date to January 2021. The whole thing is set centuries before the Skywalker films — Phase I lands around 232 years before the Battle of Yavin, roughly two centuries before The Phantom Menace. Our era page covers the same ground from inside the fiction.
Phase I — Light of the Jedi (2021–2022)
The Jedi Order at its confident height, a catastrophic hyperspace disaster, and the arrival of the marauder group called the Nihil. The adult novels are Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi (Del Rey, 5 January 2021), Cavan Scott’s The Rising Storm (29 June 2021) and Claudia Gray’s The Fallen Star (4 January 2022). Running alongside them are young-adult novels — Gray’s Into the Dark (2 February 2021), Justina Ireland’s Out of the Shadows (27 July 2021), Daniel José Older’s Midnight Horizon (1 February 2022) — and middle-grade books beginning with Ireland’s A Test of Courage (5 January 2021).
Phase II — Quest of the Jedi (2022–2023)
A jump backwards of about 150 years, to roughly 382 BBY, to show where the Nihil and the era’s religious conflicts came from. The young-adult novel Path of Deceit by Tessa Gratton and Justina Ireland arrived first (4 October 2022), followed by the adult novels Convergence by Zoraida Córdova (22 November 2022) and Cataclysm by Lydia Kang (4 April 2023).
Phase III — Trials of the Jedi (2023–2025)
Back to the Phase I timeline, picking up after The Fallen Star. George Mann’s The Eye of Darkness (14 November 2023) opens it, Tessa Gratton’s Temptation of the Force (11 June 2024) continues it, and Charles Soule’s Trials of the Jedi (17 June 2025) closes the initiative.
So which order?
Publication order, for almost everybody. Phase II is a prequel, and it was written as one — it assumes you already know what the Nihil become, and a good deal of its weight comes from that knowledge. Reading it first turns its best reveals into flat exposition.
The one group who should consider chronological order is readers who bounced off Phase I. Phase II is smaller, quieter and more self-contained, and it works as a standalone in a way the other two phases do not.
A note on formats
The adult novels, the young-adult novels, the middle-grade books and the comics were designed to interlock rather than to duplicate one another. You can read the adult novels alone and follow the story. You cannot read only the adult novels and claim to have read the whole thing — that is a fair trade, but it is worth knowing before you start.
