New books out today: A Dan Brown thriller, John Prine bio, and World Wide Web memoir

Nearly eight years have passed since Robert Langdon, the world’s most dashing tenured faculty, found himself ensnared in a dangerous global conspiracy. That’s a long wait for the professor’s loyal readers — but his spell of peace and quiet (and peer-reviewed research, presumably) is at an end.

With the publication of The Secret of Secrets — Dan Brown’s sixth installment in a saga that includes The Da Vinci Code — this week welcomes the return of an astonishingly popular series that has sold untold millions, spawned three Tom Hanks blockbusters and occasionally stoked controversy with its greatest hits list of European conspiracy theories.

But don’t worry: If cloaked menace and mysterious symbols aren’t your bag, this week’s publishing potpourri also includes musical biography, tech memoir and a couple of established fiction veterans.

The Elements, by John Boyne

Seen from certain angles, the Irish novelist’s back catalog can resemble a constellation of neutron stars, strewn with topics — such as the Holocaust and predatory priests — that are as heavy as they are luminously rendered. Don’t expect a breezy read here either. Previously published as separate novellas in the U.K., each titled according to one of the four classical elements, the interlinked stories stitched together here trace a barbed and winding legacy of sexual abuse and trauma across Ireland.

It Was the Way She Said It, by Terry McMillan

The “she” of McMillan’s title could easily serve as a nod to the author herself. After all, if there’s one thread that unites this book’s sundry contents, it’s the voice of a veteran novelist whose Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back became 1990s bywords for strong, complex Black female-led stories. Still, singular though her voice may be, McMillan doesn’t settle for a single “way” of expressing herself here. This career-spanning anthology collects a range of shorter pieces, both previously published and as yet unseen – occasionally even unfinished – from short stories and essays to quick sketches and public speeches.

Living in the Present with John Prine, by Tom Piazza

Of all the countless lights extinguished by COVID-19, few in the pandemic’s early weeks left a darkness as deep, and as widely felt, as John Prine’s death. And few felt it as closely as Piazza, a veteran music writer who, after profiling the beloved singer-songwriter for Oxford American magazine, had planned to collaborate on the septuagenarian musician’s memoir. Now, Piazza has written a different kind of reflection on Prine’s life and legacy, weaving elements of biography, travelogue and music criticism with the grief of a bereft friend, in this slim hybrid volume.

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee is credited with coming up with arguably the most consequential invention of the past half-century: the World Wide Web. But for all the ingenuity it took to propose and implement this system for universal information-sharing, it was another move that likely proved even more important: The British computer scientist’s decision to forgo a patent and keep the system free and available for anyone to use. In this memoir, Berners-Lee tells the origin story of his monumental invention and reflects on the danger and promise it presents users today, more than three decades since the first website went live.

The Secret of Secrets, by Dan Brown

It appears that good old Professor Langdon’s luck is as rotten as ever. Can’t a mild-mannered scholar attend even one lecture without being interrupted by yet another disquietingly inventive murder? In Brown’s latest thriller, his ivory tower sleuth once again must embark on a white-knuckle quest to get to the bottom of the homicidal happenings. Expect glamorous destinations, a shadowy organization and — of course — a menacing, mind-bending conspiracy sprung from centuries-old arcana.