Title: Dream Count
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Genre: Modern and contemporary fiction
Publisher: Harpercollins
Cost: Rs 599

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about love and human frailties in her new novel Dream Count (4th Estate, HarperCollins). Her signature style of multivocal narratives brings us stories about four women whose lives are interlinked. She begins and ends the novel with sections dedicated to Chiamaka, a Nigerian woman who lives in Maryland, comes from wealth, and is in search of love. The other women, Omelogor (her cousin from Abuja), Zikora (her lawyer friend from Washington DC), and Kadiatou (a Guinean asylum seeker and Chiamaka’s housekeeper), come to know each other through Chiamaka and live lives on different spectrums.

Adichie sets her novel in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although not all of it takes place during this time, it helps establish an underlying mood of uncertainty in the lives of each of these characters. The women in the book straddle various romantic and familial relationships. Some choices take them away from who they are; some are unusual but necessary for them to find themselves; some are snatched away from them. Adichie’s women are not perfect. They are complex and yearn for things that keep slipping away from them — a desire to be “truly known by another human being” in Chia’s case, or a desire to work in Kadiatou’s case.