Remember when Disney purchased Lucasfilm a few years ago they also set out to streamline the Star Wars canon. Gone were all of the novelizations, comics, and TV specials, and all that remained were the original trilogy, the prequels, Star Wars Rebels, The Clone Wars, with anything new outside of that designed to fit within the new framework. It was all so neat and clean back then, but already shit's pretty damn complicated. They put out like a million books a year and that doesn't include comics. With the new spinoff movies it's even tougher to figure out, but at least now we know exactly where Solo: A Star Wars Story will fit.
You can always find a timeline out there that puts everything into order, but publish DelRey Books has dropped an official one that places Solo: A Star Wars Story during the three year gap between novels Star Wars: Tarkin (set 14 years before 1977's A New Hope) and Star Wars: A New Dawn. Basically, it comes before Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One, which means its the first story to take place closest to the events of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which is when the Empire rises to power. Han Solo would be around 18 years old or so at the time of the upcoming movie, and spans the next 6 years of his life. That leaves plenty of open ground left to cover before the rogue shows up in his Millennium Falcon for A New Hope.
One of these days I'm going to set out to read all of these books, but already the prospect of doing so is daunting. Solo: A Star Wars Story opens May 25th.
