Worth the wait This is a beautifully written triumph

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel since 2013's Americanah is a winner

- CLAUDIA COCKERELL

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie feels contemporary culture is guilty of “shying away from the all-too human possibility of contradiction”. Her fourth novel, Dream Count, deals beautifully with the fallibility of perception. It is told from the perspectives of four connected women — travel writer Chia, who grew up in Nigeria but lives in America, her best friend Zikora, her outspoken cousin Omelogor and her housekeeper, Kadiatou. The reader is treated to rich portraits of their love lives, their desires and their experiences of womanhood, from childbirth and painful periods to the indignity and unfairness of a ticking body clock.

The novel opens unglamorously in the middle of the pandemic, with Chia worrying about having touched her face before washing her hands and having dismal discussions over Zoom about loo roll shortages. Yet lockdown is a vehicle for Chia to do that very 2020 thing: to pause and reflect. She looks back on a catalogue of failed romances which have culminated in her being “confronted with the crime of singleness” in her forties, with relatives begging her to get IVF.