Four women, four stories and one hell of a novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who returns to longform fiction a decade on from her 2013 book Americanah.
Dream Count offers a less prescriptive and richer anatomy of race, gender and the microtensions within modern relationships, as told through discrete but connected stories.
There’s Chia, a wealthy Nigerian travel writer, her financier cousin, her lawyer best friend and her maid, whose story centres around her sexual assault at a luxury hotel.
Ngozi Adichie presents feminine discomforts, solidarities, yearnings and disenchantments in a way that is lushly old-fashioned in both style and messaging. Men and the disappointments they bring feature heavily.
Yet in the end Dream Count reads as a defence of fiction’s beleaguered capacity for imaginative empathy. “I have always longed to be known,” Chia says in the opening sentence.
By the end, the reader knows these women fully.
