Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making”. Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight. The women are immigrants in the US.
Chia, a travel writer, Zikora, a lawyer, and Omelogor, a former banker turned grad student, are Nigerian; Kadiatou, a hotel maid, is Guinean. Chia’s first-person narration establishes the novel’s melancholic tone: “I have always longed to be known,” she declares in the opening line, “truly known, by another human being.” Driven to reminiscing about past lovers during the Covid lockdowns, she passes her time “grieving what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but truly known me”. Her story gives way to Zikora’s, who is desperately trying to track down the boyfriend who abandoned her following a surprise pregnancy and whose own story morphs, with a sting of surprising sweetness, into a paean to the pull of motherhood.
The narrative is then riven by the tragedy of Kadiatou’s story before being overtaken by Omelogor’s musings about her dissolute lifestyle in Abuja prior to quitting her high-flying career to undertake postgraduate research on pornography. The novel threads together childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing less than the whole of female experience is within its scope. Yet at the same time it is painfully introspective, not only because it is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, a built-in reminder of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it includes many moments – such as when, pondering one of her breakups, Chia muses about “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal gesture towards deeper traumas, the feeling of unbearable confinement alongside floating alienation, the hermetic numbness with which many of us experience grief.
Sara Collins £8.99 (RRP £9.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest?
What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?
Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
