Dream Count

A Novel

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Okuboyejo, A'rese Emokpae, Janina Edwards

Named 2025's Most Anticipated Release by The New York Times • Oprah Daily • The Times • ELLE (UK) • Literary Hub • The Guardian • The New Statesman • Financial Times • Marie Claire • Harper's BAZAAR • BBC

A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

©2025 Knopf (P)2025 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 at Oprah Daily • Reader's Digest • The Seattle Times • LitHub • The Chicago Review of Books • Marie Claire • Harper’s Bazaar • Elle • Radio Times

"As in her previous works of fiction—most recently Americanah (2013)—Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. . . . In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis. Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Adichie returns to fiction after more than a decade with this superb tale of the fleeting joys and abiding disappointments of four African women on both sides of the Atlantic. . . . [She] riffs brilliantly on what feminism means to her characters and renders each woman’s story in a distinctive voice. . . . This is well worth the wait." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Adichie portrays four women united by culture, geopolitics, immigration, sexism, trauma, and longing. . . . [She] electrifies her depictions of each character with stinging details and lacerating social critiques to striking, hilarious, and heartbreaking effect. . . . Every aspect of this transfixing, intimate, and astute group portrait is ablaze with scorching insights into the maddening absurdities and injustices that continue to plague women’s lives. . . . Adichie’s magnificently vital, sharply forthright novel will be one of the year’s most sought after and resounding titles." —Booklist (starred review)

“[A] beautiful novel.” —Zadie Smith

Fantastic voices

I loved learning about these African women’s experiences in America and Africa and Europe, etc. it was a great window into these four different characters all of whom I loved

Fascinating glimpse into affluent and working black worlds

I loved the characters, their struggles, their solidarity and most of all, their African community. I learned so much about how little I know.