Dan Brown's novel has sold millions of copies
Dan Brown's controversial novel The Da Vinci Code has won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.
Other winners included Shelia Hancock who took Author of the Year, Bill Clinton's My Life that picked up Biography of the Year and Himalaya by Michael Palin, which was awarded TV & Film Book of the Year.
Brown, who is fairly reclusive, accepted the award by video link and said he was delighted.
The book follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon who is visiting Paris. He receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. Solving the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it's leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci...clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the curator was involved in the Priory of Sion-an actual secret society whose members include Sir Issac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Da Vinci among others. The Lourve curator has sacrificed his life to protect Priory's most sacred trust: the location of a vastly important religious relic, hidden for centuries.
In the novel the characters discover the person to the left of Jesus in Da Vinci's Last Supper is in fact Mary Magdeline
The novel has sold millions of copies and sparked controversy due to its assertion that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were actually man and wife, with the Holy Grail not being an object but a bloodline descended from the couple's offspring.
Ron Howard is currently directing a film based on the book with Ian McKellen, Tom hanks, Audrey Tautou and Alfred Molina all cast.
You can read more about the novel and the movie in our database.
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