Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – a tale of four women
The Nigerian-American author returns with an astute and moving exploration of female experience
‘Novels had always felt to me truer than what was real,” declares a character in Dream Count, the highly anticipated new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a statement echoed in the accompanying author’s note, which contends that 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”. Since the publication of her extraordinarily assured debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, Adichie’s fiction has performed this task of seeing, interpreting and questioning to huge acclaim, garnering her major awards as well as a public profile far beyond most writers, whose work hasn’t been sampled by Beyoncé.
In keeping with her superstar status, Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making” and is perhaps the surest bet so far for this year’s Women’s prize. However, its publication is also accompanied by difficult personal circumstances: Adichie’s father died in June 2020, followed in March 2021, less than a year later, by the death of her mother, after which, as she writes in the author’s note, her “life’s cover was ripped off”. Having already written about her father’s death in her extended essay Notes on Grief, Dream Count, Adichie asserts, is “really about my mother”. 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.
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