Dream Count

This big book, set between America and Nigeria, was worth the 12-year wait. Since the publication of multi award-winning Americanah, Chimamanda has been busy deservedly becoming not just a literary celebrity whose books have been translated into 30 languages, but a global feminist icon. (And also a celebrity superstar whose writing has been sampled by Beyoncé and appeared on a Dior T-shirt.) Like her other novels, Dream Count is an incisive look at the African diaspora experience in America. It is a sisterhood saga that interweaves the stories of three Nigerian women and one of their housekeepers. The latter, Kadiatou, is based on the real-life hotel cleaner assaulted (and then paid off) by French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Chia is a beautiful travel writer, Zikora is her best friend and a Washington D.C. lawyer, and Omelogor is Chia’s cousin – a successful banker who goes to America to study pornography and writes the mocking advice blog “For Men Only”, which always ends, “Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.” Their lives haven’t panned out as imagined with respect to marriage and motherhood, and none of them are paired up as their Igbo families expected. Although the novel tells women’s stories, it’s really about how men – for the most part disappointing, sometimes hilariously so – shape and distort their lives. For the duration of my reading and listening weeks – for this is fantastic on audio too – it felt as though I had four new friends whose worlds were complex and middle-aged, like my own. What a treat to be invited into these lives, so deeply-imagined.