Dreams, dignity at stake in four intertwining tales

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count, her first novel in nearly 12 years, follows four West African women who migrate to the US

- Olivia Ho

DREAM COUNT
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fiction/4th Estate/Paperback/
416 pages/$31.39
★★★★★

In a 2009 TED Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned of what she called "the danger of the single story." To flatten a people, a culture or a country into a single stereotype, or allow them to be represented by a single narrative, is to rob them of dignity.

In her richly layered fourth novel, Dream Count, Adichie presents four intertwining stories, each from the perspective of a different West African woman who has migrated to America.

What emerges is a tale that sprawls across time and continents in its depiction of womanhood.

Adichie is arguably Nigeria's most iconic female writer. She has garnered both literary acclaim and pop celebrity: Her second novel Half Of A Yellow Sun (2006), about the 1960s Biafran War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction, while her 2012 TED Talk, We Should All Be Feminists, was sampled by Beyonce in her song Flawless.

Dream Count is her first novel in nearly 12 years since Americanah (2013), and expands on some of the same themes. Where Americanah is set up as dialectical — America versus Nigeria, the novel's teenage sweethearts split up by the vagaries of a visa — Dream Count is a four-hander. Three of the narratives are variations on a theme, while the fourth sings counterpoint.