Dream Count
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
Knopf
ISBN: 0593802721
416pp. 

I still get excited by books by favourite authors the way fans get excited by the new Taylor Swift or K-pop album launch. I was counting the days for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, Dream Count, since hearing of its release earlier this year, and I was confident I’d love it because I’ve loved everything she’s written, fiction and non, but here I am, a little stunned to write that I just wasn’t that into it.

I probably have myself to blame for creating the hype, though someone as celebrated as Adichie, whose work is informative and incisive, hardly needs hyping. Yet here I am, still not sure about how I feel about Dream Count — I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it. I want you to read it, especially if you love her work as much as I do, and tell me how you felt. Is there a middle for book reviews?

Here’s what I loved: Adichie gets women. She also gets the moment we’re in — from the time of her first novel in 2003, Purple Hibiscus, she has imagined and captured a particular moment through her work, with her astute observations on politics and class. Americanah, for example, was about a different kind of immigrant experience, not one about people leaving chaos in Nigeria but moving to America for more opportunities.

Her observations have earned her accolades along with awards because she understands the novel’s purpose is to go beyond observation and reflection. As she writes in her author’s note in Dream Count, the “point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it.”

If I had to strip down what Dream Count is about, I’d say she examines how much a person can know themselves and other people. The story is about four women, somewhat connected, spanning the US and Nigeria, right before and during the pandemic. This was a time when the world went into pause and isolation, brought out by a lot of fear but also vulnerability. How well did we know ourselves, our friends, our families?

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel is about four women whose lives are interconnected and spans the US and Nigeria before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Dream Count’s main characters are three Nigerians, all friends – Chiamaka (Chia) is a travel writer, Zikora is a lawyer, while Omelogor is a graduate student. Kadiatou is a Guinean hotel maid. Her story is “inspired” by Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid who accused IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn of sexual assault in 2011.

The criminal case was dropped because the prosecution felt Diallo had “credibility issues.” A civil case followed, which ended in a settlement of an undisclosed figure that Diallo said would allow her to move on with her life. The case dominated global headlines and is a major plot line in the book. The Nigerian women are connected to Kadiatou in different ways.

The pandemic is another character in the novel, so to speak, as it forms a backdrop. We may have forgotten the isolation forced upon us during the pandemic and the impact it had on us individually and collectively as a society, since it’s been five years. The novel reminds us how Covid impacted lives, especially of the characters, in the US and Nigeria.

This is what Adichie does best, when she navigates life between the diaspora and Nigeria. And because she understands women so well, she writes about the messy aspects of love, loss, heartbreak and growing older. There is no sugarcoating here, no glamorising of ageing, and I appreciate this space, without social media filters of perfection.

On to our characters. We have Chia who is “grieving what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but truly known me.” We meet Zikora, a single mother from a surprise pregnancy, searching for the man who abandoned her once he heard he was about to become a father (incidentally, Adichie wrote a standalone short story about single-motherhood called ‘Zikora’ in 2020, which I have not read). Omelogor quits a successful career in Abuja to pursue academia in the US, studying the impact of pornography on society. And there’s Kadiatou, a single mother and maid, whose partner is in prison and then whose life is rocked by the sexual assault.

While their lives are interconnected, it doesn’t flow like a novel and I think that was my issue with it. Here’s Chia’s story, then Zikora’s, then Kadiatou and now Omelogor, almost like portraits of the characters, sometimes their stories sounding like lessons in gender politics, held together by a loose thread.

This doesn’t mean I couldn’t relate to these portraits. Chia’s time during the pandemic and search for meaning in relationships resonated. She tells Zikora she’s always wanted to be “known” by another human being, to which her friend replies, maybe we’ll never know another person. Imagine this happening in the pandemic, where we are already isolated. Can we really know ourselves, let alone other people?

I wanted to hold Zikora’s hand as she had the worst partners. She navigated a difficult relationship with Kwame; wanting to leave but also staying because, despite everything — he did not treat her right, he was not willing to commit — he was there. Perhaps it had to do with her relationship with her father, who abandoned her mother and her to remarry. As Zikora adjusts to becoming a single mother while still trying to find a way to get Kwame to come see his child, her mother says something quite spot on: “Men say all kinds of things. It is what they do that matters.”

We’ve all encountered men like these in our lives — absent fathers, absent partners, man-children who can’t take accountability. But there are some good men in Dream Count: Chia’s father, her partner Chuka who supports her work as a travel writer despite not fully getting what kind of a career it is, and Kadiatou’s partner Amadou, who returns from the US for her because he promised he would.

It is not just men that break hearts in Dream Count. The justice system lets them down too; the way the world favours the rich and powerful will also break your heart. The media’s coverage of Kadiatou’s trial shouldn’t surprise but it sickens nonetheless. How do you dream big in a system that is rigged against the poor and the vulnerable?

The reviewer is a journalism instructor

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 21st, 2025