The arrival of Dream Count, the first novel in more than a decade by the acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a literary moment brimming with anticipation – though I suspect I will not be the only one of her admirers to have opened it with a tremor of apprehension too. Two of Adichie’s previous novels – Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013) – are among my all-time favourites. I also had the privilege of interviewing Adichie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2017, and encountered then the force of nature that she is. Her exhilarating mix of intellect, insight, wit and irreverence had the audience – and me – enraptured. As we parted company that night, I asked her when her next novel might appear. Her answer gave me the impression that it wouldn’t be imminent, but I would have been sad to know another eight years would pass before it arrived.
As I sat down to read Adichie’s fourth novel, Dream Count, I wasn’t sure it could live up to her past achievements. Thankfully, it took me just a couple of pages to feel quietly confident that it might – and it absolutely does. This is a complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. It is deeply and richly feminist. It probes at the nuances of life and laments how reductive modern discourse can be: “ideology blocks different ways of seeing”, as Adichie observes in her author’s note. It explores big themes – misogyny, masculinity, race, colonialism, cultural relativism, the abuse of power, both personal and institutional – but it does so subtly, almost imperceptibly. The book’s lessons on life and the world we inhabit are not thrust didactically at the reader but considered through the profoundly human experiences of her characters.
The novel opens in early 2020, in the shadow of the Covid pandemic. The story moves backwards and (slightly) forwards in time, but it’s the experience of lockdown – the looming prospect of it and then its disorientating reality – that anchors the narrative. It is testament to the strength of Adichie’s writing that she transports us back into the atmosphere of that time, recreating how it felt. As one of the novel’s central characters, Chia, puts it: “In the middle of lockdown, I felt trapped in my house, with the sensation of my days being erased, not lived through, not experienced.”
Adichie perceptively conveys the fear and bewilderment of those days. We grappled with questions to which there were either no answers or wildly contradictory ones. We followed advice (dished out by people like me) as if our lives depended on it, while simultaneously wondering how behaviours so trivial could ever protect us from such a contagious virus: “What did ‘don’t touch your face’ and ‘wash your hands’ mean,” Adichie asks, “when nobody knew how this had started, when it would end, or what even it was?” We doubted that life would ever be the same again.
Adichie’s story unfolds through the lives, passions and heartbreaks of four deeply connected but very different African women. Chiamaka (Chia) – the lynchpin who connects the others – is a Nigerian living in America. At first glance she seems feckless. A not very successful travel writer, she wanders the globe to see – and write about – interesting places through African eyes. The resulting articles are rarely published, but her family’s wealth allows her to live the high life and pursue her dream of writing a book. Chia, however, is a fascinating character: kind, strong and unashamed to pursue the life she wants. Under pressure from her family and African culture to marry and have children, she holds out for true love. The opening sentence of the novel encapsulates what she yearns for: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.”
Stuck in her Maryland apartment during lockdown, she reflects on her past relationships. This is the dream count of the novel’s title. Each of the men she loved sparked the hope of a happy future, only to let her down or fail to live up to her ideal. The moral of Chia’s story is, at heart, an inspiring one: in this one life we have, don’t succumb to the pressure (societal or internalised) to settle for second best. Take the risk of holding out for better. “I did not want what I wanted to want,” she tells us.
Zikora, also Nigerian, and a hotshot corporate lawyer in Washington DC, is Chia’s best friend. She is the least likeable character, but she wasn’t always the slightly bitter, humourless, grudging woman that she becomes over the course of the book. She suffers betrayal, of a truly heartbreaking nature, by a man she loves. Her experience reminds us of the multitude of ways – active and passive – in which men let women down: “Every woman has a story like this, where a man has lied to her or betrayed her and left her with consequences.” Bitter? Perhaps. True? Almost certainly.
That Zikora is the character who comes closest to embracing victimhood (the book is much more about women’s strengths) is extraordinary in the light of Kadiatou’s story. Kadiatou (Kadi) is from Guinea, an asylum seeker to America. She is employed as a maid in a hotel, and also works for Chia. She is determined that her daughter, Binta, will get to live the American dream. Just as Kadi is finding her way, forging a future, she steps into the path of a man who brutally abuses his power. In her author’s note, Adichie tells us that Kadi’s story is based on real-life events. To say more would reveal too much. Suffice to say that, through Kadi, Adichie examines another theme: the power of literature, not just to create fictional stories that illuminate the world, but to tell true stories that society would rather have us forget. As Chia wonders: “Why was a novel a metaphor for [the] unrealistic… novels had always felt to me truer to what was real.”
Omelogor, Chia’s cousin, whom she adores, is perhaps the most interesting character. A successful banker in Nigeria, she has made her fortune by helping the rich and powerful launder money – facilitating the corruption bleeding her country dry. She is eventually repelled by her own actions but doesn’t stop. Instead, she siphons her own portion of stolen wealth into a company – Robyn Hood – that gives micro-grants to women running or trying to start businesses. Through Omelogor, Adichie probes the complex ethics of these transactions, and examines toxic masculinity. Convinced that pornography is the root of fraught gender dynamics, Omelogor starts an anonymous blog called “For Men Only”, encouraging male readers to confront their behaviour. She even takes a career break in America to study a masters’ in pornography. But here she encounters a clash of cultures between an America she comes to loathe and pride in her African identity – even those parts of it she is expected to denigrate: “I am proud of it because it is African and I am African… can you understand that love and pride complicate? They can implicate as well but first you must see how they complicate.”
Romantically, Omelogor travels through life from one short-term relationship to another – or as Chia calls them, “short passion attacks”. Hovering in the background, though, is a relationship with a woman. There is a sense that, even if it is buried in her own subconscious, Omelogor is a lesbian.
Wrapped around the novel, almost in an embrace, is the figure of the mother. Adichie implies a woman’s relationship with her mother, for good and ill, is the defining relationship of her life. Adichie lost her own mother in February 2021, and a sense of personal loss pervades the book.
Dream Count is an extraordinary novel. Please let it not be another decade until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns once more.
Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate, 416pp, £20
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[See also: The battle for the soul of Serbia]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone