Dream Count
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4.0 • 31 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'Reads like a feminist War and Peace. A magnificent novel' SUNDAY TIMES
‘A complex, multi-layered beauty of a book. Extraordinary’ NEW STATESMAN
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLER; LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025
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.
‘The major publication milestone of 2025’ OBSERVER
'The return of a literary titan' TELEGRAPH
CHOSEN AS A SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMES, INDEPENDENT, TELEGRAPH, GQ and COSMOPOLITAN BOOK OF 2025.
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.
‘Expect everyone to be talking about this one’ INDEPENDENT
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The publication of Dream Count has been hugely anticipated and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does not disappoint. This is her first novel since 2013’s Americanah and comes almost 20 years after the influential and much-loved Half of a Yellow Sun, although Adichie has written essays and a memoir in the interim.
Dream Count follows the somewhat interconnected lives of four Nigerian women, spread across the globe and operating in different sections of society. There is sadness and introspection, and there are thoughts on love, politics, raising children and colonialism. There are bad dates and there is generational trauma. And through it all, Adichie’s writing shines with brilliance. Her knack for capturing the rhythms of everyday life, the laughter and the tender moments, means the heavier topics do not weigh the story down. This is a beautiful novel and Adichie proves she is a writer worth waiting for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adichie (Americanah) returns to fiction after more than a decade with this superb tale of the fleeting joys and abiding disappointments of four African women on both sides of the Atlantic. It begins with Chiamaka, a Maryland-based travel writer from Nigeria who recounts her history of failed romances while laid up during the Covid-19 lockdown. Adichie then turns to Chiamaka's best friend Zikora, a pregnant Washington, D.C., lawyer who's determined to celebrate achieving her long-held dream of motherhood even though her husband has just left her. The next section follows Chiamaka's cousin Omelogor, who leaves her job at a corrupt bank in Abuja, Nigeria, for an MBA program in the U.S., hoping to discover the part of herself that is "noble and good." She's bewildered by all the "perfect righteous American liberals" in her program, including a classmate who accuses her of Islamophobia for sharing the story of her uncle's murder by anti-Christian militants, and her disenchantment turns to rage. Most heartbreakingly, Chiamaka's Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, is sexually assaulted by a prominent French economist and politician at her hotel cleaning job, and the case draws scrutiny on her after it receives international notoriety. Adichie riffs brilliantly on what feminism means to her characters and renders each woman's story in a distinctive voice—Omelogor's rants in particular provide a thrilling contrast to the cool autofiction of Chiamaka's sections. This is well worth the wait.
Customer Reviews
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What a way to be a woman for women, a fellow even in expressing feelings unseen, unrecognised and unadressed by the world at large!
Absolutely amazing!
What a book! Characters so fully fleshed out they feel more real than real people that I actually know. Clear prose that carries such profound depth and emotion!