End of six-year wait for Da Vinci Code fans as Langdon returns

SIX years after the release of his mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, a thriller set over a 12-hour period and featuring Da Vinci Code symbolist Robert Langdon, will come out in September.

“This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey,” Brown said in a statement. “Weaving five years of research into the story’s 12-hour time frame was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon’s life clearly moves a lot faster than mine.”

The first printing will be five million copies, Knopf Doubleday said, the highest in the publisher’s history, but well below the opening 10 million-plus print run for the final Harry Potter book. The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 80 million books worldwide and inspired a spin-off community of travel books, diet books, conspiracy books, parodies and religious works.