Through the characters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, we see our own blind spots and our audacity to hope, writes Shayera Dark.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dream Count
HarperCollins, 2025

After a twelve-year hiatus from long-form fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has returned with Dream Count, a collection of four intertwined novellas centred on the lives of four women: Zikora, a high-flying Nigerian lawyer and the subject of Adichie’s 2020 short story ‘Zikora’; Omelogor, a wealthy Nigerian banker; Kadiatou, a Guinean housekeeper; and Chia, or Chiamaka, a Nigerian freelance travel writer whose stories bookend the novel.

The narrative, set in Guinea, Nigeria and the United States, begins during the Covid pandemic but jumps back and forth, rifling through the various romances, unspoken desires and revelatory events that connect and distinguish each character. 

In the cocoon of her charmed life in America, Chia reminisces about her time with an old flame, Darnell, a dull, self-absorbed art historian described as ‘the Denzel Washington of academia’, who treated her with such blatant contempt that one wonders if she had ever heard of self-worth. After Darnell came Chuka, an attentive Nigerian engineer who made his intentions for marriage known from the start of their relationship. But he was too staid and predictable, as she reflects after an aunt pesters her about marriage: ‘I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person.’

Unlike Chia, who harbours dreamy notions and longs to be truly known, her best friend Zikora is more pragmatic. All she wants is a Catholic wedding and a couple of children. Alas, her romantic life has involved two ‘thieves of time’:

[…] she stayed waiting for them to propose, waiting while her late thirties slid past, and waiting still. If she wanted a nice necklace, or a holiday, or a condo, she could swipe her credit card and it would be hers, but her truest longing, for marriage, depended on someone else.

The first of these men wanted her to abandon her career after having children (‘I don’t believe in nannies’), the second simply wanted the convenience of a girlfriend to clean up after him. Later, she meets Kwame, a charming Ghanaian American—charming, that is, until she tells him she’s pregnant and he suddenly ghosts her. In the throes of giving birth, her fraught relationship with her mother erupts, opening up old wounds but also revealing facets of the older woman that Zikora comes to understand and, later, respect, as they care for her baby together.  

Kadiatou’s story, the moral core of the novel, is a fictionalised retelling of the real-life account of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who worked as a housekeeper in a prestigious New York hotel and endured many weeks of humiliating media coverage after accusing former French presidential candidate and former International Monetary Fund head honcho, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of sexual assault in 2011. In her author’s note, Adiche explains that her rendering of Diallo’s story was an attempt ‘to “write” a wrong’, and invites ‘willing readers to join in this gesture of returned dignity’.

Kadiatou’s life begins in Guinea, and tragedies strike for her in rapid succession. She loses her loving father in a landslide, and undergoes female genital mutilation, the horrors of which Adichie depicts with literary finesse: ‘She was shocked that she had been cut, so shocked she made no sound. Such painful pain. Her head felt like a whole waterfall trapped in a shell.’ Days after the procedure, Kadiatou looks ‘fearfully down at herself, her lower body felt detached, a thing apart, no longer hers’. Later, she’s married off to a loveless man who dies mysteriously, and she finds her way to America with her lover and child. There, she meets Chia, who hires her as her housekeeper. And it is in America that her nightmare with the country’s justice system and salaciously intrusive media begins, following a gruesome encounter with a VIP hotel guest: 

She knew in that moment that he did not think of her as a person alive and breathing like him. She was a thing, a thing to own and invade and discard, and this frightened her.

The scene thrums with horror at the rabid indignity of the act, at the nonchalant self-importance of her attacker, who emerges from his suite unfazed, heedless of her psychological and physical pain. 

Chia’s cousin Omelogor is next to take centre stage. Sarcastic, smart and outspoken, Omelogor is content with the life she’s built for herself in Abuja. She hosts and attends raucous dinner parties, dates and dumps men like used tissues, and flies around Nigeria handing out grants from her Robyn Hood initiative to help women start businesses (with money from shady banking deals). Despite her vast material wealth, she is an unmarried, childless woman in her mid-forties, and her family doesn’t believe she’s truly happy. When an aunt badgers her to adopt a child, she replies ‘there are other ways to live’. Later, she leaves her job to travel to the US to study pornography. 

As the only character based in Nigeria, Omelogor wields her outsider perspective on American culture with a scorching sneer. Her opinions scandalise her liberal classmates, who in turn attack her, leaving a sour taste in her mouth that turns bitter when her supervisor rejects the premise of her thesis. Frustrated with the programme, Omelogor launches a website, For Men Only, on which she dishes out wry advice, signing off with the line: ‘Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.’

Readers familiar with the backlash Adichie endured following her 2017 comments on trans women may notice parallels between some of Omelogor’s wounded complaints about her liberal classmates and the Nigerian novelist’s viral 2021 blog post ‘It is Obscene’, which skewered the sanctimonious, hard-hearted illiberalism of American liberals and non-American allies. With this in mind, one could be forgiven for seeing Omelogor as ventriloquizing the author’s own anger and opinions. 

‘Perfect righteous American liberals,’ notes Omelogor, after her classmates dismiss her remarks on religious violence in northern Nigeria as Islamophobic. ‘As long as you board their ideology train, your evilness will be overlooked. Champion an approved cause and you win the right to be cruel.’

Apart from the one-dimensional, ungenerous portrayal of Omelogor’s classmates, another area where Dream Count suffers is in its near-saintly depiction of Kadiatou, whose only fault is that she lies, which leads to the criminal case against her assailant being dropped. But these flaws are subsumed by Adichie’s sparkling commentary on friendship, class, immigration, misogyny, the vestiges of colonialism, women’s bodies and the ethnic discrimination of the Igbo in Nigeria and the Fula in Guinea. The pacing of the novel is compact, Adichie’s observations of human foibles acute, the writing is funny, captivating and alive with metaphors that leap off the page. Here is Adichie’s description of the mining town Kadiatou is forced to move to with her husband, for instance: 

She felt as if she had been dropped inside a world shorn of its feathers. The air was soiled, the soil arid. To look at the mine itself on their way back was to shudder at a vast harsh expanse of disemboweled earth, gaping helplessly, stark and stripped of life. 

In stitching together a plotless narrative of unresolved dreams, with women who are adept at diagnosing each other’s flaws but incapable of training the same analytical gaze on themselves, Adichie has dutifully crafted characters that are messy and real. Through them, we see our blind spots, our audacity to hope and—to quote Adichie—‘how humanity isn’t an endless procession of virtue’, which, of course, is a hallmark of any good work of fiction.

• Shayera Dark is a writer whose work has appeared in publications that include LitHub, Harper’s Magazine, Al Jazeera, AFREADA, The Kalahari Review and CNN.