US author Dan Brown posed during a press conference to present his new book titled “The Secret of Secrets” on September 18, 2025 in Prague, Czech Republic. (Photo by Michal Cizek / AFP) (Photo by MICHAL CIZEK/AFP via Getty Images)MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images
If you come across Dan Brown out for a walk with his dog and muttering to himself, do not be alarmed: He’s probably just cracked the code on a thorny plot point in his next novel.
He’s more of an iPhone voice note guy these days, but he used to dictate notes into the kind of analog voice recorder journalists might use.
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“I was like, ‘If I lose this, somebody is going to call the police, because you’re panting because you’re walking, and you’re saying, ‘Okay, so kill the cardinal, drown him in the Fountain of Four Rivers …’” says Brown, chuckling as he tells this story over a camomile tea at the Toronto Four Seasons hotel when he was in town a few weeks ago.
As his (many, many) fans will know, Brown isn’t referring to some sinister conspiracy he was embroiled in but to a plot point in 2000’s Angels & Demons, the first novel in his Robert Langdon series – and the one that came before The Da Vinci Code, the book that changed his life and had the kind of impact authors can only dream of in a postmonocultural world. See: More than 80 million copies sold, a movie starring Tom Hanks that made US$$111-million in its first week in North America alone, an archbishop dedicated by the Vatican to debunking its “shameful and unfounded errors” after its controversial – and fictional! – content (for example, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together) caused a furor among Catholics.
“It came out at a moment when there was a lot of distrust in the church, of authority in general,” says Brown, who just published the eighth instalment in the series, The Secret of Secrets. “What happened for readers is the same thing that happened for me – the story made more sense to me than what I had been taught in church.”
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He maintains that he really didn’t think the book would be controversial. “Maybe that was naive of me, but it took me totally by surprise,” he says. “I asked, ‘What does it mean for Christianity if Jesus is not literally the son of God but his immortal prophet?’ That seemed like a pretty reasonable question, but …no, no, no.”
Brown, now in his early 60s, is self-deprecating about the way the intervening two decades have taken their toll on his working memory. “When I wrote Da Vinci Code, I could take a walk, see everything in my head – move it around, take some notes,” he says. “Now, I go for a walk and I’m like, ‘Okay, his name is Robert Langdon. I got that.’ It’s crazy.”
Something that has not dulled, however, is Brown’s appetite for taking on lightning-rod topics – Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, artificial intelligence a decade before ChatGPT made it mainstream – and packaging them into heart-stopping thrillers liberally peppered with real factoids from history and current events.
In The Secret of Secrets, Brown’s first book in eight years, he takes on the very nature of human consciousness, and whether anything remains of us after our physical death.
“I like writing about big topics, and with consciousness there really is no bigger topic. It’s the lens through which we see reality, through which we interact with each other,” he says.
Just as Brown started writing this book, his mother died, a loss that shaped some of the bigger questions this book explored. “What just happened? All of her hopes and dreams, did they just go ‘poof!’ and they’re gone? Or is there something else?” he asked himself.
Brown says he didn’t have any kind of religious experience in the process – “this book is all based on science,” he says – but writing it changed his mind entirely on what comes after we die.
“If you had asked me when I started this book, ‘Is there life after death?’ I would have said no. What happens when you die? Absolutely nothing. It’s like falling asleep and you don’t wake up. The computer cable has been cut, and it’s just wires,” says Brown. “Eight years later, having done all of this research, I’ve come out the other side.”
As a result, Brown says, he is “significantly” less afraid of death. “I’m in no hurry. I have a wonderful life and I’m very grateful for it,” he says. “But that notion of ‘My God, at some point this is over,’ is no longer a terror. It’s a curiosity.”
That fear of death, he adds, seems to be responsible for “a lot of bad behaviour,” things such as nationalism, prejudice and materialism that spring up when we’re racing against a finite clock to make our mark on time. “There’s thinking that if the human race realizes this is just one stop on a much longer journey, maybe a lot of that behaviour starts to fall away,” he says. “That’s what I’ve seen in interviewing people who’ve had near-death experiences. They change their lives. They quit their job to do something else, they make amends with people, all of those really benevolent things.”
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While he only briefly touches on manifestation in the thriller – which revolves around the theft of a manuscript purporting to contain a paradigm-shifting revelation about the nature of consciousness, with renowned symbologist Langdon in hot pursuit – Brown says he does remember people asking him if he’d somehow spoken The Da Vinci Code’s phenomenal result into existence.
“People asked, ‘Did you know it was going to happen? Did you envision it?’ and I said, ‘Sure, you always envision success, but I did it for my first three books and they were failures,’” says Brown. “I would put my faith in hard work, persistence and a little bit of luck.”
Brown says that, at the end of the day, he just writes the books that he would want to read himself. “It’s been so gratifying that so many people share my taste, and that really is how I think about it,” he says. “The people who share your taste are your readers, and the people that don’t are your critics.”
And while Brown does have his share of detractors, he’s far more interested in the person who picks up his book and says it reminds them of how much they love reading. “If I could win every award and every great review, I would trade it all in a heartbeat for a faithful readership,” he says. “That’s who I’m writing for.”
The best compliment he’s ever gotten, Brown adds, was from a librarian who said that reading his books was like eating your vegetables but it tasted like ice cream.
“That’s exactly right. My first job is to entertain, or else nobody turns the pages. My second job is to make you so curious about a topic that you close the book and dive into something else to learn more about it,” he says. “I write in the grey area between two things – between noetics and materialism, national security and civilian privacy, antimatter and Vatican history. That grey area in the middle is where I like to live, and it sparks a lot of dialogue.”
Brown also has a strong sense for the sort of stuff that will be catnip to his readership. In The Secret of Secrets, for example, he features real-life Devil’s Bible, notable for a distinctive portrait of Satan and being the largest medieval manuscript, at 92 centimetres tall, ever created.
“It’s just so cool, and it’s real. And you look it up and you see that it’s made with the coats of 237 donkeys,” he says. (It’s actually 160 hides.) “I know that readers are like me. They want to learn, and they want to hear about cool stuff. So when I find out about the Devil’s Bible, this has to be in the book.”
The Secret of Secrets, Brown says, is 200,000 words long but he estimates he wrote a million to get to that point. About half of what he cut was science, which he painstakingly refined to make more accessible to a general audience. And when things may be tiptoeing toward the far-fetched, he adds, his hero Langdon is there to be the “skeptic on your shoulder,” doing the heavy-lifting so readers can relax.
“And by the time he’s convinced, you’re like, ‘I’m convinced,’” he says.