A deluxe edition of the novelization for the final film in George Lucas’s epic Based on the story and screenplay by George Lucas, bestselling author Matthew Stover’s <Revenge of the Sith< novelization captures the iconic characters of <Star Wars< in all their complexity and brings a space opera masterpiece full circle. The pivotal final steps of Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side, the end of the Republic, and the rise of the Empire are rendered in stunning style.

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Matthew Stover believes that everything worth knowing about his life can be found in his books.

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**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This stunning deluxe edition of Revenge of the Sith, the bestselling novelization of the final film in George Lucas’s epic Star Wars prequel trilogy, features:

• Over 170 annotations and a new introduction by author Matthew Stover
• A removable transparent acetate jacket with a foil-stamped silhouette of Darth Vader
• A full-wrap illustrated book case beneath the acetate jacket
• Red foil edges with black text of an iconic quote
• Illustrated endpapers depicting two pivotal scenes
• A red-satin ribbon marker
• A belly band with the barcode and title details, fully removable to keep your book pristine**

“The best Star Wars novel.”—IGN

Based on the story and screenplay by George Lucas, bestselling author Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelization captures the iconic characters of Star Wars in all their complexity and brings a space opera masterpiece full circle. The pivotal final steps of Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side, the end of the Republic, and the rise of the Empire are rendered in stunning style.

In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Revenge of the Sith, this deluxe fully annotated edition features never-before-shared insights into the creation of a masterpiece, with over 170 annotations and a special new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Matthew Stover.

“Widely regarded as one of, if not the, best novelizations in the series and possibly the medium.”—Gizmodo

Leseprobe
1

Anakin and Obi-Wan

Antifighter flak flashed on all sides. Even louder than the clatter of shrapnel and the snarl of his sublight drives, his cockpit hummed and rang with near hits from the turbolaser fire of the capital ships crowding space around him. Sometimes his whirling spinning dive through the cloud of battle skimmed bursts so closely that the energy-scatter would slam his starfighter hard enough to bounce his head off the supports of his pilot’s chair.

Right now Obi-Wan Kenobi envied the clones: at least they had helmets.

“Arfour,” he said on internal comm, “can’t you do something with the inertials?”

The droid ganged into the socket on his starfighter’s left wing whistled something that sounded suspiciously like a human apology. Obi-Wan’s frown deepened. R4-P17 had been spending too much time with Anakin’s eccentric astromech; it was picking up R2-D2’s bad habits.

New bursts of flak bracketed his path. He reached into the Force, feeling for a safe channel through the swarms of shrapnel and sizzling nets of particle beams.

There wasn’t one.

He locked a snarl behind his teeth, twisting his starfighter around another explosion that could have peeled its armor like an overripe Ithorian starfruit. He hated this part. Hated it.

Flying’s for droids.

His cockpit speakers crackled. “There isn’t a droid made that can outfly you, Master.”

He could still be surprised by the new depth of that voice. The calm confidence. The maturity. It seemed that only last week Anakin had been a ten-year-old who wouldn’t stop pestering him about Form I lightsaber combat.

“Sorry,” he muttered, kicking into a dive that slipped a turbolaser burst by no more than a meter. “Was that out loud?”

“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?” He looked up through the cockpit canopy to find his onetime Padawan flying inverted, mirroring him so closely that but for the transparisteel between them, they might have shaken hands. Obi-Wan smiled up at him. “Some new gift of the Force?”

“Not the Force, Master. Experience. That’s what you’re always thinking.”

Obi-Wan kept hoping to hear some of Anakin’s old cocky grin in his tone, but he never did. Not since Jabiim. Perhaps not since Geonosis.

The war had burned it out of him.

Obi-Wan still tried, now and again, to spark a real smile in his former Padawan. And Anakin still tried to answer.

They both still tried to pretend the war hadn’t changed them.

“Ah.” Obi-Wan took a hand from the starfighter’s control yoke to direct his upside-down friend’s attention forward. Dead ahead, a blue-white point of light splintered into four laser-straight trails of ion drives. “And what does experience tell you we should do about those incoming tri-fighters?”

“That we should break—right!”

Obi-Wan was already making that exact move as Anakin spoke. But they were inverted to each other: breaking right shot him one way while Anakin whipped the other. The tri-fighters’ cannons ripped space between them, tracking faster than their starfighters could slip.

His onboard threat display chimed a warning: two of the droids had remote sensor locks on him. The others must have lit up his partner. “Anakin! Slip-jaws!”

“My thought exactly.”

They blew past the tri-fighters, looping in evasive spirals. The droid ships wrenched themselves into pursuit maneuvers that would have killed any living pilot.

The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlike mandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids closing rapidly on their tails, cannonfire stitching space on all sides, the two Jedi pulled their ships through perfectly mirrored rolls that sent them streaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Republic cruiser.

For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner’s starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it’s already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.

But these particular pilots were far from merely human.

The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other’s paint. Tri-fighters were the Trade Federation’s latest space-superiority droid. But even the electronic reflexes of the tri-fighters’ droid brains were too slow for this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin’s head-on. Both vanished in a blossom of flame.

The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely keeping his starfighter out of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser’s ventral hull. Before he could straighten out, his threat display chimed again.

“Oh, marvelous,” he muttered under his breath. Anakin’s surviving pursuer had switched targets. “Why is it always me?”

“Perfect.” Through the cockpit speakers, Anakin’s voice carried grim satisfaction. “Both of them are on your tail.”

“Perfect is not the word I’d use.” Obi-Wan twisted his yoke, juking madly as space around him flared scarlet. “We have to split them up!”

“Break left.” Anakin sounded calm as a stone. “The turbolaser tower of…