Origin

Edmond Kirsch is forty years old, a billionaire futurist, and has found an answer to the two questions humanity cannot stop asking: where do we come from, and where are we going? The announcement planned for a Guggenheim gala becomes chaos when Kirsch is murdered before he can complete his presentation. Robert Langdon and the museum's director must recover the algorithm that holds Kirsch's discovery before the forces that killed him can erase it permanently. Dan Brown structures Origin as a debate between science and religion told through a thriller.

Paul Michael narrates with the pace-conscious delivery that the Dan Brown formula demands — the chapters are short, the revelations frequent, and the audio listener needs a narrator who treats the urgency as real rather than manufactured. At just under 18 hours, Origin is Brown's longest Robert Langdon novel and most explicitly philosophical, asking questions about creation that the thriller structure can only partially contain.