It’s no surprise that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel took her nearly ten years to write. Since the publication of her two prize-garlanded epics, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013), she’s become a celebrity, sampled by Beyoncé, appearing with Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, gracing the covers of Elle, Vogue and Marie-Claire. Add to that the deaths, in close succession, of her much-loved parents and you can see why the focus and equilibrium needed to finish a book might be in short supply. 

But here it is, a ‘publishing event’, complete with strict embargo and chocolate-­box gold on the galley cover. What’s inside the shiny packaging, though, is unexpectedly personal and experimental. Dream Count tells the intersecting stories of four women, Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou and Omelogor. Much here is familiar from Adichie’s earlier work: Nigerian and American mores and misunderstandings satirised; family tensions and love relationships dissected; motives and self-deceptions probed with sharp precision. But the tone is different, darker and more inward; the structure emphasises fragmentation and subjectivity. Each character has a separate section; for the middle-class Igbo cousins Chiamaka and Omelogor, almost avatars of the sisters in Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie has surrendered the omniscience of the third person for a more partial view through the narrow pronoun ‘I’. 

Although the novel tells women’s stories, it’s really about how men shape and distort women’s lives, enabled by our own conditioned and contorted expectations. ‘I did not want what I wanted to want,’ says Chiamaka of the most apparently suitable of her boyfriends, a solid, kind, successful Nigerian engineer who also thrills her in bed: ‘I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.’

Chiamaka is a travel writer based in Maryland who dreams of writing a novel. She opens the book, adrift in the existential wasteland of the Covid lockdown, ruminating on her search for ‘the resplendence of being truly known’. Idealism or delusion? She certainly hasn’t found it with Chuka, or with Darnell, the smug black American academic who resents and envies her wealth and tells her she’s ‘hormonal’ whenever she’s unhappy, or with a tall, guilt-ridden Englishman who turns out to be married. Each love affair gives Adichie scope to deploy her satirical wit, but there’s something contrived and pat about this triad, as if the ideas are pulling all the strings of the story. It’s when Chiamaka reminisces about her parents, especially her mother, that her first-person voice feels most authentic, open to the pain of love: ‘Whenever I walked past airport duty-free, a waft of any florid perfume would bring pangs of nostalgia so intense they almost hurt – for childhood, when my mother and I would sit at her enormous dressing table while she held my hair in bunny-tails … all the time song-praising me.’

Chiamaka’s best friend, Zikora, is desperate to marry and live the Nigerian middle-class dream: ‘first a lucrative and prestigious job, then a splashy Catholic wedding, followed shortly by two children, or maybe three’. She too has a series of boyfriends, ‘thieves of time’, but when we meet her she’s in labour, her mother at her side and no husband in sight. ‘Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart,’ says the American nurse. ‘Hold yourself together,’ whispers her mother in Igbo. Caught between the clashing demands of two cultures, Zikora just can’t win. The agony of her labour frames the tale of the betrayal that’s brought her to this point, for which she blames herself: ‘Now she was flagellating herself, slipping on the cloak of responsibility, looking for a reason to excuse him.’

Clever Omelogor, Chiamaka’s feisty cousin, has no patience for all this. With her grand house, driver, gateman, private chef and SUVs, she’s made it to the pinnacle of a corrupt Nigerian banking operation, from which she embezzles money to give to small, women-led businesses. But her first-person voice doesn’t match the Omelogor we’ve seen through the other women’s eyes: it’s too generic for her spiky personality, too bland for a woman who writes the snarky advice blog ‘For Men Only,’ which always ends, ‘Remember, I’m on your side, dear men’. She seems constructed as a foil to Chiamaka and Zikora rather than imagined, a vehicle for Adichie’s merciless evisceration of ‘the world of the Americans of the pious class’: ‘You Americans need to climb out of your cribs. You think the world is American; you don’t realize that only America is American. To be so provincial and not even know that you are.’

It doesn’t help that Omelogor’s section follows Kadiatou’s, which could easily stand as a novella on its own. Kadiatou is a Fula woman from a village in Guinea, the daughter of a miner who works ‘peeling gold from the stomach of the earth’. Her childhood world is rich with scents and colours; the writing glows with the reality it clothes: ‘The harmattan was harsh … and rams lay dead on parched farmlands like rumpled cloth.’ Adiche unfolds Kadiatou’s story slowly, patiently, with gentle empathy: the grief of her father’s death; the agony of her ‘cutting’ so that she can be married; her quiet complicity – ‘Her future was fire-dried, too firm to change without chaos, and she dreaded chaos.’ 

Chaos comes for her, of course. Public events flicker in the margins of her life: the persecution of the Fula people by Guinea’s first president, Sékou Touré, in the 1970s; the 1999 murder of the Guinean Amadou Diallo in New York City, shot forty-one times by police. She falls in love with another Amadou, who leaves for America; she loses her sister, marries and gives birth as a widow. Years pass before Amadou comes for her. In America she works in the low-paid jobs new immigrant women do and cleans for Chiamaka, watching the boyfriends come and go: ‘Chia would leave him soon, she had not found what she was looking for, and she didn’t know she never would, because it simply did not exist.’ She is innocent and wise and full of trust, until a VIP (think Dominique Strauss-Kahn) assaults her in the posh hotel where she works as a chambermaid and the American ‘justice’ system grinds her between its teeth.

Adichie’s account of the assault and its aftermath is so vivid I almost felt I had lived through it myself. It’s as if the novel has been softening us up for this – the brute power nestled at the heart of the other women’s woes. The other sections add their own dimensions. Hybridity is fashionable; fragmentation is part of the world in which we live. What, after all, does it mean to be ‘truly known’? It’s difficult now to write a serious realist novel like Adichie’s earlier works. But that – the full imagining of other lives from both inside and out – is where I think her heart and deepest talents lie.