Dream Count

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, 2025

Pages 399

Rebooting Relationships, Counting Regrets: Adichie’s Dream Count

Pradip Mondal reviews Adichie's Dream Count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel Dream Count (2025) comprises a total of five interconnected stories, narrated from the perspectives of four women who are immigrants in the U. S. The novel starts with the narration of Chiamaka/Chia (a Nigerian-born who works as a freelance travel writer) and ends with Chia, coming a full circle. The in-between narratives are by Zikora (Chia’s lawyer friend), Kadiatou/Kadi (she comes to America from Guinea on an asylum claim and works as a maid in a posh hotel in New York, formerly Chia’s domestic help in Guinea), and Omelogor (Chia’s cousin who worked as a banker but later comes to the U. S. to study pornography).

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When Dream Count opens, the COVID-19 pandemic has moored Chia in her home in Maryland, Chia makes calls to her rich family in Nigeria and London through Zoom. The lockdowns have brought the world to immobility, as people nervously speculate on what the future holds for them. Suspended in this strange existence, Chia begins to sift through multiple doomed liaisons with a combination of regret, rehashing, and relief. The novel begins and ends in pandemic, but feels like a sweeping saga, defying time and space. Dream is used as a narrative trope in the novel as all the four women move to the U.S. in the hope of materializing their respective version of “American Dream”. Though what these four pine for is always out of reach, the pall of gloom should not dissuade them from rising again: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall” (Confucius).

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This fear of being forgotten is reflected in Chia’s first-person narration: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being” (Adichie 3). Chia’s anxiety intensifies when she can’t get married even at the age of forty. Her lovers or what she termed as SPA—“short passion attack” keep changing from Chuka to Darnell to a married Englishman to an anonymous Kenyan to a Qatari man to Luuk to Johan.

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The novel has humor galore. When Zikora is in the labour room, the nurse dictates, “Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart”, while her mother instructs her, “Hold yourself together”. In her blog, “For Men Only”, Omelogor advises men about proper conduct with the fair sex: “Dear men, I understand that you don’t like abortion but the best way to reduce abortion is to watch where your male bodily fluids go” (p. 297). Darnell was introduced to Chia by one of her classmates as “the Denzel Washington of academia.”

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The novel deserves to be read only for the sake of narrative nuances and rich use of language. Some of the expressions deserve mention: “the forced embrace of loneliness”, “a feeling like peeling sweet fruit”, “cascading of goosebumps”, “in dawn’s diluted light”, “memories were slippery in her hands”, and “rams lay dead in parched farmlands like rumpled cloth”.

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One of the moving episodes in the novel is that of the sexual assault on Kadiatou. After being sexually assaulted by a VIP guest in a luxurious New York City, Kadi reluctantly (in fear of losing her job) lodges a complaint against the guest for sexual violation. In the “Author’s Note” at the end, Adichie confirms, Kadi’s character has been inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant working as a room cleaner in a posh NY City hotel, who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then head of the IMF, of sexually assaulting her in 2011. A criminal case against him was dropped later that year when questions arose about Diallo’s credibility. Adichie’s novel fictionalizes that assault to seek the truth and thereafter righting the wrong.

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Overall, the novel is replete with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in a language that is pregnant with beauty and power. The diverse experiences faced by these four women in the U.S. can be relatable to anybody’s life as an immigrant. There is not much by way of chronological “plot”, as the narratives move from the present to the past to the present again. It is not a perfect novel as excitement slackens towards the end. Nonetheless, Adichie is a robust storyteller who simply hypnotizes the reader with her humour, wit, and prose. For that reason alone, this novel warrants a read.