What’s new: A new Dan Brown novel, essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates, stories by Jeffrey Eugenides

ORIGIN, by Dan Brown. Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and star of “The Da Vinci Code” and other novels, is back in action. This fifth outing takes place in the Spanish cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and Bilbao — and you can bet Langdon will be paying a visit to the Guggenheim Museum. As the title suggests, “Origin” tackles some big questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? (Doubleday, $29.95)

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. You may have read the eight essays collected here — on race in American life — when they were first published in The Atlantic from 2009 to 2016. They’re well worth rereading in the Age of Trump, and the book’s new material — commentary on Coates’ life and thoughts as he wrote them — is a vibrant exercise in intellectual autobiography. (One World, $28)

FRESH COMPLAINT, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Fans of Eugenides’ novel “The Marriage Plot” will rejoice at the reappearance of Mitchell (and his traveling companion Larry) in one of the 10 stories — written between 1988 and 2017 — in the author’s first collection. Another reintroduces Dr. Peter Luce (the sexologist from “Middlesex), but even without familiar characters, Eugenides’ writing is sly and exuberant. (FSG, $27)