New Star Wars books to bridge gap between Jedi and The Force Awakens

Ahead of this December’s major cinematic drop - Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Disney Worldwide Publishing and Lucasfilm Press will release 20 books to flesh out the time period between Return Of The Jedi and the forthcoming sequel.

This raft of new material will be published under the banner Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The books will range from standard novels to comic books all way to sticker books for pint-sized Force fans.

“The Force Awakens is an extraordinarily, heavily guarded storyline. To track it, a lot of top-secret meetings were happening up in San Francisco as we worked through this program,” says executive vice president of Disney Publishing Worldwide Andrew Sugerman.

In order for novelists and editors to forge a connection with the established Star Wars universe, several hush-hush meetings were held with filmmakers currently crafting the sequel and the standalone movies.

“The partnership with the story group and the editorial team always had to be true to the sanctity of the film while making sure that we find these moments to introduce hints, clues, and puzzle pieces,” Sugerman went on to say.

“Without revealing what those pieces are, it will just allow readers to speculate about the new film: What could a location mean, or what could a character mean?”

The new book series will hit shelves this autumn, before Star Wars: The Force Awakens blasts into cinemas on December 18.

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Gem Seddon is GamesRadar+'s west coast Entertainment News Reporter, working to keep all of you updated on all of the latest and greatest movies and shows on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Outside of entertainment journalism, Gem can frequently be found writing about the alternative health and wellness industry, and obsessing over all things Aliens and Terminator on Twitter.