A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 at The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Elle, Oprah Daily, Readers Digest, The Seattle Times, LitHub, The Chicago Review of Books, BET, and Radio Times
“Innovative . . . . Adichie’s attention to hierarchies of language, the misuses of jargon, is one of her superpowers . . . . Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in a dozen years, is dreamy indeed. An accumulation of scenes and sensations, cloudlike in their contour, floating this way and that against the backdrop of the pandemic that messed up sleep — and time itself — for us all.”
—Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times
“Expansive . . . . The lives depicted in Dream Count are linked without being integrated, like tapestries on the four walls of a room . . . . The four women are sympathetic allies, but they tend to be better at diagnosing each others’ problems than facing their own. That’s a very recognizable flaw, and Ms.Adichie treats it as humanely as the rest of this tender and wistful novel.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“More than 10 years on from Americanah, this latest book is infused with something new and distinctive in Adichie’s prose: a crystal-clear purposefulness, moral and furious . . . . What elevates the story is, as ever, the emotional acuity of Adichie’s writing . . . . In her ‘Author’s Note’, Adichie admits to seeking ‘to “write” a wrong in the balance of stories’, offering ‘clear-eyed realism, but touched by tenderness’. Realism, yes, but tenderness most of all.”
—Shahidha Bari, Financial Times
“Dream Count feels like a homecoming. The Nigerian author’s first work of longform fiction in over a decade reminds us of the sharp wisdom and sturdy empathy that have made her one of the most celebrated voices in fiction . . . . Dream Count succeeds because every page is suffused with empathy, and because Adichie’s voice is as forthright and clarifying as ever. Reading about each woman, we begin to forget that we’re separate from these characters or that their lives belong to fiction.”
—Helen Wieffering, Associated Press
“Dream Count is resplendent with Adichie’s wry wit.”
—Bill Coberly, The Bulwark
“A rich, complicated book that spans continents and classes . . . . Moving through a comedy of manners and a hall of horrors, [their] stories overlap and intersect in ways that suggest the vast matrix of the African diaspora . . . . The extraordinary sympathy of Adichie’s storytelling makes Dream Count deeply compelling . . . . Adichie’s descriptions of these relationships are infused with comedy and pathos and a touch of romantic suspense, though the endings are foretold. What remains is the sweet sorrow of what might have been, rendered in language that feels entirely natural and yet instinctively poetic . . . . Adichie makes no effort to snap these four stories together neatly. Instead, the women interact and allude to one another naturally, allowing us periodically to register how they regard each other with sympathy or irritation, friendship or condescension . . . . The lives of Chia, Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou unfold here in different tones, but all benefit equally from Adichie’s ability to plumb their particular desires, their hopes and anxieties. You can hear that in the way she hones her style to reflect each woman’s education and experience . . . . Dream Count compels us to acknowledge, once again, that no story is ever just a single story.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Dream Count reminds you of what made Adichie such a phenomenon in the first place: Those precise sentences; that biting satire; all those vivid, complicated women." —Constance Grady, Vox
“Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (‘Chia’), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight.”
—Sara Collins, The Guardian
“This is a complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. It is deeply and richly feminist . . . . 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 . . . . Dream Count is an extraordinary novel.”
—Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman
“At times, Dream Count reads like a feminist War and Peace . . . . Suffused with truth, wit, and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. It made me feel frustrated about the world but very good about the state of fiction.”
—Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times (UK)
“Dream Count features the interwoven stories of four women, written in Adichie’s vivid, bracing, highly entertaining style. Like Americanah, it is set in the US and Nigeria, and covers the immigrant experience, the sometimes tense dialogue between Africans and African Americans, the Americanisation of language and thought; as well as mother-daughter relationships, friendship, the pressure on women to marry and have children, and – aptly – late motherhood.”
—Charlotte Edwardes, The Guardian
★ “Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ "Adichie riffs brilliantly on what feminism means to her characters and renders each woman’s story in a distinctive voice . . . . This is well worth the wait.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
★ “Every aspect of this transfixing, intimate, and astute group portrait is ablaze with scorching insights into the maddening absurdities and injustices that continue to plague women’s lives . . . . Adichie’s magnificently vital, sharply forthright novel will be one of the year’s most sought after and resounding titles.”
— Booklist (starred review)
The tone, tempo, and lilting intonation of all four narrators make this listening experience rewarding. This novel--really four connected, finely crafted novellas--simply engages the listener from the start. Three of the major characters are Nigerian women: a travel writer, a successful lawyer, a powerful business woman--and the fourth, also West African, a maid at a posh hotel. Their stories intertwine. Looking for and finding love is a theme throughout. A set piece based on the 2011 rape of an African maid at a posh New York hotel is re-created fictionally, and the author provides a detailed endnote explaining how she decided to reimagine it. This is Adichie's first novel in more than a decade, and it is a compelling audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
★ 2025-01-22
Four Nigerian women are poised at emotional crossroads that compel them to scrutinize their lives.
Isolated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a novelist-turned–travel writer sheltering in suburban Maryland, is struggling to stave off boredom and loneliness through regular Zoom calls with family and friends in the U.S., Europe, and her native Nigeria. It’s not enough, and soon this professional tourist resorts to filling the empty spaces of time with mental excursions through the ruins of past love affairs beginning with Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia,” whose magnetism created waiting lists for his art history classes and had Chiamaka looking past his personal slights—for a while, anyway. Then there was Chuka, a more considerate and less mercurial man who shared both her African homeland and an address in the Washington, D.C., area. Nothing wrong there besides what Chia characterizes as “that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.” As in her previous works of fiction—most recentlyAmericanah (2013)—Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. This style extends into the stories of three other Nigerian women in Chia’s life. Zikora, her best friend, is a tough-minded attorney accustomed to speaking brutal truths to others but vulnerable to ill-starred love affairs with men she thinks of as “thieves of time,” one of whom leaves her while she's pregnant, forcing her to raise a child alone—though not without unexpected help. Kadiatou, Chia’s housekeeper, has overcome challenging odds in raising her gifted daughter, Binta, by herself in America, but is the innocent victim of a sordid scandal that jeopardizes her future. And Chia's cousin, the glamorous, self-possessed Omelogor, is a formidable presence in Nigerian finance but prone to melancholy, rumination, and regret. In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis.
Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.
