The Bad Batch Returns In a New ‘Star Wars’ Novel

It’s been over a year since Star Wars: The Bad Batch ended, but it was a given Clone Force 99 would eventually live on beyond the screen. Next month, we’ll check back in with the team in their first novel, Sanctuary.

Written by Lamar Giles (Ruin Road), the tale takes place towards the end of season two after the episode “Pabu.” Now that they’re working with pirate hunter Phee, the Clones—Hunter, Omega, Wrecker, and Tech—are on resource gathering duty after the planet’s recent tsunami. That leads to them running two different jobs pretty close to each other: stealing a relic from an auction to return it back to its people, and ferrying a pregnant couple on the run. Hunter wants to be sensible and just do one job at a time, but that’s not doable, and to further complicating matters, there’s an ISB agent gunning for the couple, who are due to give birth any day now.

Giles told Polygon he hopes the novel feels like “the feeling of an extended bonus episode where our favorite characters got exciting moments that felt fresh and familiar. I wanted it to feel like seeing old friends after some time apart amid an intense adventure.” You can read an excerpt here, which features the Clones trying to get the relic through conventional auction means before things inevitably pop off.

Sanctuary: A Bad Batch Novel releases August 5. If you’re looking to revisit other Star Wars eras through books, there’s also Finn and Jannah’s YA story The Last Order coming October 21 from Kwame Mbalia.

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