“I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known,” thinks Chiamaka, the protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s blisteringly emotive new novel Dream Count – her first in over a decade.
The book begins in the pandemic. Chiamaka, known as Chia, is a 44-year-old from a wealthy Nigerian family, working as a travel journalist and based in the United States. She has travelled the globe and had numerous relationships. Yet, as lockdown forces her to take stock of her life, she realises she is alone.
It’s a romantic opening. Adichie, who grew up in Nigeria and has long been based in the US, is known for blending such heartfelt personal stories with big political ideas. Since the publication of her debut novel Purple Hibiscus in 2003, and then her prize-winning works Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and Americanah (2013), Adichie has made her name as an unabashed chronicler of cultural conflict, race, class, gender and the immigrant experience.
What is more, Adichie is one of very few genuinely international public intellectuals. Her ascension into total cultural stardom came with her 2012 TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists, since viewed more than six million times. Beyoncé sampled it on her 2013 single “Flawless”, and Dior put the slogan on a £700 T-shirt.
This feminist manifesto won Adichie plaudits: she played a vital role in taking feminism mainstream. But discord came in 2017 when an interviewer asked her whether a transgender woman was “any less of a real woman”. Adichie replied: “a trans woman is a trans woman” – clearly opposing the popular pro-trans phrase “trans women are women”. She later wrote a blog post expressing her support for trans rights, but the damage was done. The culture had shifted – and Adichie had been left behind.
“How slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance,” thinks Chia in Dream Count, when her Aunty Jane insists she have IVF, and our protagonist imagines the “exploding horror” her family would have had if, 10 years ago, she suggested having a baby without a husband. You can’t help but think of Adichie looking at her own public treatment post-2017 as she wrote that line. The years since have been relatively quiet for Adichie, publishing one children’s book and one non-fiction book, Notes on Grief (2021), which was a 96-page extended essay about loss, written in the aftermath of her father’s death.
Dream Count, then, is a long-awaited return to her primary form – the novel – and a chance to remind her critics what made her so well-regarded in the first place.
It is a relief that she has not succumbed to the trend for ultra-thin novel-lites, instead sticking to her penchant for a multi-character, multi-decade heft of a book. It is a relief, too, that she has not attempted to wade any further into discussions about transgender people – or anything else that might suggest she is not quite as progressive as we once thought.
Dream Count is, however, a very 2025 novel, attuned to the facets of cancel culture and the often laughable things people do to ensure they are not subjected to it. On one of Chia’s ex-boyfriends and his circle, Adichie writes: “They were ironic about liking what they liked, for fear of liking what they were not supposed to like, and they were unable to feel admiration, and so criticised people they would simply have admired.” What a sad world we live in, Adichie seems to say.
Chia isn’t the only one who has been unlucky in love. The story turns to her best friend Zikora, a high-flying lawyer. We meet her in the throes of childbirth, while she is still dealing with the disappearance of the baby’s father. By her bedside is her mother, a woman Zikora has never got on with, until the experience of childbirth brings a new intimacy to their relationship. “Her mother was becoming a person before her eyes,” Adichie writes, beautifully.
The third woman we hear from is Kadiatou, Chia’s housekeeper. Born in Guinea, Kadiatou has experienced endless loss, including that of her sister, who died from the effects of female genital mutilation (FGM), which Kadiatou was also subjected to. She seeks asylum in the US and is building a life for herself until she is sexually assaulted by a high-profile guest in the hotel where she works – in a case resembling that of Nafissatou Diallo, who in 2011 said that former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had attempted to rape her. Like Diallo’s, Kadiatou’s case is dropped due to accusations she has lied about her past. It’s a damning story about how female migrants of colour – especially those who are poor and uneducated – are let down every step of the way.
The fourth member of Adichie’s quartet is Chia’s cousin Omelogor, who lives in the Nigerian capital Abuja and is a senior banker doing work she knows is corrupt. So she starts her own illegal scheme: withdrawing money under the account name Robyn Hood, and distributing her “grants” to struggling women. “Free money just like that? They’ll spend it. They’ll never use it for business,” says a male friend when Omelogor tells him her plan. “You don’t know women,” she quips.
There are plenty of moments to laugh about. Chia often brings together Zikora and Omelogor, despite their mutual dislike. When Chia tells Zikora her cousin has been depressed since living in the US, Adichie writes how “Zikora felt cheered… Omegolor crying? Omegolor could cry? Whatever America had done to her, God bless America.” Elsewhere, tales of the men the women have dated provide great entertainment, not least in Adichie’s zappy description of one of Omelogor’s exes: “He was not my Big Man type; my Big Man type was self-effacing, but he was puffed up like boiling beans.”
Dream Count is, too, a novel about mothers and daughters, most notably Zikora’s acknowledgement that she does, in fact, need her mother’s support, and the ways in which Kadiatou’s love for her daughter Binta powers her every move. In the book’s afterword, Adichie notes that she wrote Dream Count during a time of grief for her mother, who died in 2021. It is “a grief still stubbornly in its infancy, its so-called stages not so much begun as utterly irrelevant, its contours intact and untouched,” she writes, typically profoundly. It is a testament to the seismic power of Adichie’s talents that a book that has come out of her most personal grief is so universal.
The novel is richly written and acutely observed. We have long known Adichie is one of our foremost feminist thinkers, but in Dream Count she writes astutely about the physical as well as the intellectual. Included here are not just sex and sexual assault, but the pain of periods, pregnancy and childbirth, and the unspoken impact of conditions such as pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder. She is also attuned to the mundane discomforts of womanhood: of ill-fitting knickers that ride up between your buttocks, of the sweat that pools under your breasts when you get anxious.
It feels refreshing to read an author so willingly threading together high-minded feminist theory with such bodily writing. In a world where the very existence of female bodies is a threat to the patriarchy – see the ongoing practice of FGM, and the fracturing of abortion rights in the US – it is a reminder that in that we need these stories more than ever.
Credit: inews