Origin

Origin is a thriller by the American writer Dan Brown, published in 2017 as the fifth novel in the series about the Harvard professor Robert Langdon.

The book opens with a private meeting at a monastery in Catalonia, where Kirsch tells a Catholic bishop, a rabbi and an imam what he is about to make public and gives them advance warning out of respect rather than doubt. The main action then moves to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where Kirsch has built an announcement into a multimedia event, and to the curator Ambra Vidal, who is engaged to the future king of Spain and who ends up on the run with Langdon when the evening collapses into a killing. Brown's usual furniture is all here, in the architecture, the symbols and the machine of an institution protecting itself, but the argument has moved from the origins of Christian doctrine to artificial intelligence and the question of where the human species comes from and where it is going. As in the earlier Langdon books, the pursuit runs through real buildings and works of art, and the solution to the evening's mystery depends on the connection between Kirsch's invention and the person who ended his announcement.