Dream Count

Photo by Manny Jefferson

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Harper Collins, 2025

Review by Isabelle Dupuy

‘I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being,’ says the rich and beautiful Chiamaka, the first of the four characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel Dream Count. The path to this desire is fraught with danger because the closest candidate for this elemental longing would be one’s mother, not lover. It’s the first year of the Covid pandemic and Chiamaka is self- isolating in Maryland, USA. On Zoom we meet her best friend, lawyer Zikora, in nearby Washington DC; her cousin Omelogor in Nigeria; and her housekeeper Kadiatou. The reader is invited into each of these women’s bubbles and their own quests to be known. 

Adichie occupies a special place in contemporary literature. She is the mainstream author who writes Black women as everywoman, neither ‘Interpreters of Struggle’ nor representatives of a minority or a history. She does this without downplaying who they are. They are Black women. As she explains: ‘To be human day to day is not […] an endless procession of virtue.’  Ethnicity is a fact because human beings come from different places: it is not a qualifier. And every woman has dreams. It is the casual humanity of her characters that has lifted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work above the identity silos and made it of wider significance.  

If there is a kind of conversation for each decade of life, Dream Count is about women in their forties, before the menopause. When there is still hunger but experience too. Mothers are not yet too old to provide cues for how to, or how not to, live. Yet the world has changed. Colonial hierarchies have been replaced by a rush to oligarchy. Financial independence and professional success are achievable. Adichie is talking about her generation of women who had more choices than their own mothers ever had, but with a particular problem that becomes clear in their forties: No one thought about how men would respond to these new women. Adichie takes us inside their aloneness, whether they’re in America or in Nigeria, but also their resilience. 

Chiamaka lives in America, where she struggles to be recognized as a luxury travel writer and dreams of a man who would truly know her. When she may have found him, she says no: ‘I did not want what I wanted to want.’ She wonders how much she knows herself: ‘It was a kind of possession, the incomplete knowledge of ourselves.’ 

Zikora has built a successful career but feels incomplete without a husband and children: ‘her life was not where it was supposed to be, and she did not know why other people were being given what she too deserved.’ Her professional ambitions did not free her from her religious upbringing. From a young age she believed ‘that love had to feel like hunger to be true.’ It will take a baby for her to discover her mother as a human being and then herself as a worthwhile one, even without a man.

Omelogor thinks she understands men. She knows how to handle her boss and this gains her fast promotions at her bank in Abuja. To become rich, she observes her male superiors and imitates their unethical trades. She even starts a website called ‘For Men Only’ to help men do better with women. A stint in America ends in depression and, once back in Nigeria, Omelogor embraces the liberty money brings. She helps women from her ancestral village and beyond and she treats her friends to lavish parties. She tries to be lucid about life: ‘money deceives in how much it cannot prevent, and in what it cannot protect you from.’  She finds peace in her large house with her Frenchified chef, her gardener, her chauffeur. When her dotty aunt, in a last ditch effort to save Omelogor from a manless, childless, future life tells her: ‘Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.’ Omelogor is surprised at how profoundly disturbed she is by that statement.

Kadiatou is the symbolic character that holds up a sobering mirror to the three middle-class women. Like them, she is Black and African but she is poor, uneducated and mutilated. A hotel maid and a selfless carer for Chiamaka and her friends, she is a grateful immigrant because the promise of America has come true for her and her daughter – until she is sexually assaulted by a white client of the hotel. The promise of America keeps true for a brief moment when the man is arrested, but soon the reality of America takes over and Kadiatou is hounded, vilified and terrorized. In her Author’s Note, Adichie explains how the character of Kadiatou was inspired by the case of Nafissatou Diallo and Dominique Strauss-Kahn almost fifteen years previously. Diallo was forced back into invisibility after the case was dismissed and Adichie, through Dream Count, is giving this fellow African woman a ‘returned dignity.’ In this age of revisionist narratives, Dream Count reminds us why literature matters. It opens our hearts. Adichie does not change history nor does she deny the reality we live in. She creates memorable characters we care for. Just as with those we love, we are willing, if only for a moment, to take a fresh look at the world and at what can be done.

Dream Count/Harper Collins