21 Star Wars Books You Should Read

Crop of cover of Vision of the Future, Book 2 of Timothy Zahn’s Hand of Thrawn duology. Image via original publisher Bantam Spectra

8. The Hand of Thrawn

Once again, we return to Timothy Zahn for a duology. However, before we even dive in to a quick summary of the two books, a warning: this book is the direct sequel to The Thrawn Trilogy. It will make approximately zero sense if you do not read The Thrawn Trilogy first. You can skip Outbound Flight and Allegiance if you really want to, though.

Now that that’s out of the way, the Galactic Civil War still remains unfinished, though the two books wrap it up. Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future explore the Empire’s last attempts to take down the New Republic…or at least one faction’s attempt to take it down.

Specter does serve as a big buildup for Vision, but you can’t avoid reading both to get the whole story. It also, as per usual, features Mara Jade and her burgeoning relationship with Luke in the Legends universe. (Sorry, she doesn’t exist in the new canon universe yet. So she’s also probably not Rey’s mom.)

Goodreads praises the buildup and bridging from earlier major series into the New Jedi Order, as well as the well-written politics.

If you find yourself liking The Thrawn Trilogy, you will almost certainly end up reading these two as well.