# Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – candid conversations with friends

The author’s first novel since 2013 – a stately sisterhood saga about a group of women whose lives haven’t turned out quite as planned – continually reframes our understanding of the quartet, practically offering four books for the price of one.

## Introduction

Had it become possible to forget that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a very good novelist? More than 10 years have passed since her last novel, __, and in that time she’s become a bona fide star (name another author who would be asked to advertise makeup or have ), a public figure whose influence extends beyond readers of her breakout novel, the Orange prize-winning Nigeria-Biafra war epic __ (2006).

Like _Americanah_ and her story collection _The Thing Around Your Neck_, Adichie’s new novel, _Dream Count_ – a big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines, dramatic but not plotty – is poised between Nigeria and the US. Where those earlier books were often concerned with eyeing American mores from immigrant vantage points, this one is more a bumper compilation of middle-aged life experience, built around the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives haven’t panned out as imagined with respect to marriage and motherhood – a state of affairs to which the book delivers a full-throated “so what?” while refusing to sideline any potential for heartache and regret.

But if Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor aren’t each paired up as their Igbo families expected, the problem is men: the slightly hard-to-parse title, with its faint echo of “body count”, portends a patient tallying of hopes repeatedly dashed by innumerable inadequates. We’re in Washington DC in early 2020 when the novel kicks off. There’s talk amid ominous news from Wuhan that “human-to-human transmission” isn’t possible, and someone’s using the end of a teaspoon to key in their pin at the ATM, but while Adichie deftly captures the prevailing atmosphere of pre-lockdown uncertainty, the pandemic is only a backdrop for reminiscence as the first of the novel’s four main characters, 44-year-old travel writer Chiamaka, starts Googling old boyfriends, setting the stage for a totting-up of shitty guys, or “thieves of time”, per her best friend, Zikora.

Chiamaka, the youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy Nigerian businessman (“Jesus fucking Christ. Is that actually his net worth?” someone asks, searching his name), recounts half a dozen ill-chosen affairs, from a two-timing academic who answers her question about where they stand by telling her that’s “a hackneyed question lifted from the contemporary morass that is pop culture”, to a secretly married Englishman met online in London. Whatever the relationship, Chiamaka ends up alone, unless you count the sisterhood, continued in lockdown over Zoom, of Zikora, a lawyer, and Chiamaka’s enjoyably sharp-tongued cousin, Omelogor, a double-dealing banker in Abuja. There’s also Chimaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, who came to the US after the death of her father in a mining accident, and whose perspective also gets equivalent airtime at the book’s halfway point.

> Dream Count sings with the sheer concentration of the kind of experience novels usually ignore

## Review

Dream Count sings with the sheer concentration of the kind of experience novels usually ignore. Omelogor describes having sex with a pot-bellied, small-penised lover who asks, “Am I hurting you?”, to her retrospective derision; there’s a description of a postpartum perineal tear, as well as the fear of breaking the stitches during a bout of constipation; someone gets a rash from her lover’s insistence on using a particular kind of beard oil.

If _Americanah_ sometimes seemed reverse-engineered to address topical talking points – part of the novel was told in the form of a character’s blog posts – the handling of sensitive issues (the impact of pornography, say, or Instagram-fuelled worries about body image) are incorporated more smoothly here into light-footed dialogue. Yes, familiar fun is had at the expense of people who say things are “problematic”, not to mention a white editor who wants more “relevance” from Chiamaka’s travel writing (“Congo and the struggles of the people there would really resonate right now... Somalia or Sudan would work too”), but Adichie’s social portraiture is usually more generous than just satirical. That generosity extends to the reader, too: less a family saga than a friendship saga, _Dream Count_ practically gives us four novels for the price of one, each of them powered by the simple but evergreen thrill of time spent in the company of flesh and blood characters lavishly imagined in the round. It was worth the wait.

_Dream Count_ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by 4th Estate (£20). To support the _Guardian_ and _Observer_ order your copy at . Delivery charges may apply.
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