Dream Count

A publishing event ten years in the making – a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists – the story of four women and their loves, longings and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until ― betrayed and brokenhearted ― she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

Review

‘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’ Sunday Times

‘Quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight. Masterly’ Guardian

‘This is a book that will make your heart ache, but in the best possible way, and it cements Adichie’s reputation as a storyteller of both heft and readability’ Good Housekeeping

'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 … Dream Count is an extraordinary novel. Please let it not be another decade until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns once more' Nicola Sturgeon, New Statesman

'Luxuriously layered. It’s the return of a literary titan' Telegraph

'Deeply compelling' Washington Post

‘A big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines … powered by the simple but evergreen thrill of time spent in the company of flesh and blood characters lavishly imagined. It was worth the wait'Observer

‘Adichie electrifies her depictions of each character with stinging details and lacerating social critiques to striking, hilarious and heartbreaking effect. 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. Magnificently vital’ Starred Booklist review

‘Love, death, motherhood – it’s all here, and few can handle it as capably as Adichie’ GQ

‘As finely constructed and evocatively realised as the rest of Adichie’s memorable work’ Harper’s Bazaar

About the Author

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than 55 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Financial Times. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; the essays We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and Notes on Grief; and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a book for children. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.