Dream Count - by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

- NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

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, has been successful at everything until--betrayed and brokenhearted--she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Chiamaka's bold, outspoken cousin Omelogor 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.

Dream Count is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's searing, unforgettable story of these four women--a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself.

Review Quotes

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)

About the Author

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction "Best of the Best" award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama's Sleeping Scarf, a children's book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.