Book Review: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie paints a true picture of grief through immigrant lives

Hindustan Times

26-04-2025

Since her dazzling debut, Purple Hibiscus, announced her as a literary force in 2003, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has worn many hats — novelist, essayist, cultural critic. Yet each of her new works manages to somehow deepen our understanding of her unique voice. With her latest work, Dream Count, Adichie returns not just to fiction but also to the intimate terrain of memory, identity, and grief; threading these themes through the lives of four immigrant women. At its heart, her new book is a quiet powerhouse. It is Adichie, doing what she does best: capturing the inner weather of her characters with prose so elegant it almost glides past you until it punches you in the gut.
The novel unfolds through four interwoven narratives. There's Chiamaka (Chia) — a Nigerian travel writer marooned in the US by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic — but we quickly realise that marooned isn't quite the right word. Chia chooses to stay, clinging to the messy safety of disconnection, even as her family pleads for her return. Then there's Zikora – Chia's steely friend and a successful lawyer – juggling courtrooms and personal silence. Omelogor, Chia's cousin – trades finance for academia, chasing a degree — and goes for something like a reinvention in a landscape that rarely offers clean slate for women. Finally, there's Kadiatou – Chia's Guinean housekeeper – whose story is reminiscent of real-life events relating to the emotionally thunderous case of a New York hotel housekeeper named Nafissatou Diallo.
Through these women, Adichie crafts a kaleidoscope of the overlooked immigrant experience during the pandemic. The lives of these women overlap in subtle and profound ways, echoing the novel's deeper concern with how we connect and disconnect, how we remember and forget, and most piercingly, how we grieve!
Adichie has spoken of this book as being 'really about my mother,' and it shows. There's a personal weight humming beneath each chapter, not in overt autobiographical detail, but in the novel's aching awareness of loss and the disorienting stillness that often follows. Set against the global stillness of the pandemic, Dream Count becomes both a time capsule and an elegy. The book pulses with contradictions of real life as moments of loneliness are laced with humour and silence holds space for unsaid love. The trauma often hides in the small, quiet things such as a dinner left uneaten, or a voicemail never returned.
But perhaps the most remarkable achievement is how this work of writing sneaks up on you. It's not loud, not even plot-driven in the traditional sense yet by the end you realise something profound has shifted within the characters, and maybe within yourself as well.
Title: Dream Count
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: ₹599