What to Expect From Dream Count, Chimamanda Adichie’s First Novel in 12 Years

The African literary world is abuzz with excitement. Award winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a novel coming out titled Dream Count that will be published by Random House on March 4, 2025. It explores the lives, loves, and regrets of four Nigerian women against the backdrop of the pandemic.

Dream Count is more than just a new book—it’s a monumental return for fans who have been waiting for Adichie to go back to writing long-form fiction. By the time Dream Count comes out next year, it would be nearly twelve years since her last novel. In the intervening years, Adichie has published essays, short stories, four chapbooks—Dear Ijeawele, We Should All Be Feminists, Notes on Grief—and, most recently, a children’s book. For fans, Dream Count is a return to the genre that made them fall in love with her writing in the first place.

The novel is centered on Chiamaka, is a Nigerian travel writer living in the U.S. During the pandemic, she revisits her past relationships and grapples with feelings of longing and loss. Here is a bit of synopsis:

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 typical Adichie fashion, the novel is about self-discovery and the difficult choices women face in their personal and professional lives.

What Can We Expect?

As the countdown begins for the release of Dream Count, here are a few speculations worth noting.

Adichie is known for creating complex female characters that quickly become everyone’s imagined besties—think Kainene and Ifemelu. Is Chiamaka going to join the ranks of Adichie’s characters that everyone wishes were on their group chat?

This is a pandemic novel, so we should expect to see characters going deep, confronting desires and regrets to the point of becoming low-key unstable. Does this mean that the overall tone of the novel might be on the darker side?

Adichie’s novels are usually crowded with characters, but she her last novel, Americanah was centered on a clear lead. This novel seems more like an ensemble cast of mostly women, giving slight sex-and-the-city-meet-nollywood’s-fifty vibe where women are given space to play out the drama and complications of their lives unapologetically.

The publisher’s note calls Dream Count an exploration of “the very nature of love itself,” which is new for Adichie. While love has always been present in her stories, it was usually tied to bigger themes like identity, war, and race. This time, love takes center stage. This suggests that there’ll be a lot of digging deeper into relationships and how they shape, and are shaped by, personal choices. It could also signal an evolution in Adichie’s writing, that she is using the deeply intimate, vulnerable side of experience as the glue to hold her fictional world together.

What has not changed since the last novel is the novel’s geographical sweep—from the U.S. to Nigeria. Adichie, in ways that mirror how on life, likes these transnational stories that show how women move about, command, and make sense of space.

A story that centers love, women, and intrigue: is this going to be novel fans have been waiting for all these years? Will it be worth the wait? What new conversations and controversies will this novel spark?

May 2025 might long time to wait to find out, but pre-ordering a copy (here) will give you some peace of mind.