I bought Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as an airport paperback in May and read it in June and it absolutely lived up to the author’s other fantastic novels and the long wait since her last book (see my blogs on Americanah, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun).

This novel is set just before Covid lockdown and tells the story of four African women. Three are Nigerian friends Chiamaka (a travel writer struggling to find her voice who suffers the curse of being born rich and drifting through life), Zikora (a lawyer) and Omelogor (a dodgy banker who is money-laundering the cash of rich Nigerians until her stomach turns and she steals some money for herself to do some good in making micro-loans to poor Nigerian women). The fourth woman is Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, who I slowly realised as I read is the fictionalised maid who was r sexually abused by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 (criminal charges were dropped but he later settled a civil case). I remember following the news at the time and the way both she and he were portrayed in an era before Me Too – he the liberal hero and she the unreliable money-grabbing witness bringing down his good name. Her fictionalised story here puts that to rights and shows the act itself, how implausible it was that it could have been anything but coerced, how lawyers and translators ran rings around her, and how she just wanted to get on with life with her daughter and to get the press out of her life.

The four woman are all grappling with searching for love with the right person, men who let them down, having children, their own commitment issues, as well as family expectations, careers and friendships, and all with the pandemic looming over them. I loved spending time in the worlds of these four women and would highly recommend Dream Count to anyone looking for some great summer reading.