Literary Review
All the rage
Dream Count
Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie
(Fourth Estate, £20)
NOVELS are never really about what they are about,” writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in an author’s note at the end of her new book – her first for 12 years. “Dream Count is, yes, about the interlinked desires of four women, but, in a deeply personal way not obvious, at least not immediately so, to the reader, it is really about my mother.”
Adichie has already written about the loss of her beloved father James in a memoir, Notes on Grief, which described how she “came undone” when he died in 2020. Her mother Grace died the next year, and this novel can be read as a parallel – and more complicated – tribute to her.