Dream Count
A Novel
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4.1 • 114 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
• 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Dream Count follows the intersecting lives of four West African women to uncover basic human truths both hard and hopeful. All the women’s stories are tied to Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer stranded in Maryland during the pandemic who’s lonely and haunted by her past romantic wreckage. Her cousin Omelogor is a depressive business hotshot in Nigeria, dogged by sadness despite her accomplishments. Chia’s BFF, Zikora, is a lawyer and single mom who can handle anything but heartbreak. Kadiatou is Chia’s housekeeper, who has had to endure hard times without the advantages Chia’s privilege has afforded. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie dives deep into their inner lives, touching on classism, gender politics, cultural identity, and immigration dynamics along the way. But at the bottom of it all is the love they all long for, whether it’s from family, friends, or romantic partners. Adichie’s prose is utterly organic—the conversations feel completely real, and amid all the big emotions she never overlooks the little things that make the stories universal and relatable. By turns tragic and triumphant, Dream Count is about women doing whatever it takes to find their place in the world.
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
She’s done it again
She explores the nuance of African woman hood, that so many of us can relate to. The common pressures and feelings and a grappling with a foreigners in both America and our countries of origin.
Fantastic
A fantastic book. Obsessed with the writing style and the characters.
SA trigger warning
I have loved every single book by Adichie until now. I read an interview about this book from Adichie and was excited to read it. What I encountered was not what I was expecting. This is a sad book. The other characters diminished as the only character that mattered was Kadiatou. While I appreciate the author’s note about the content, I wish the book description reflected the content better and included a trigger warning. I don’t consume content with assault as it haunts me and is not entertainment. In the wake of Kadiatou’s story, I struggle to find the significance of the other characters.