DREAM COUNT

Four Nigerian women are poised at emotional crossroads that compel them to scrutinize their lives.

Isolated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a novelist-turned–travel writer sheltering in suburban Maryland, is struggling to stave off boredom and loneliness through regular Zoom calls with family and friends in the U.S., Europe, and her native Nigeria. It’s not enough, and soon this professional tourist resorts to filling the empty spaces of time with mental excursions through the ruins of past love affairs beginning with Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia,” whose magnetism created waiting lists for his art history classes and had Chiamaka looking past his personal slights—for a while, anyway. Then there was Chuka, a more considerate and less mercurial man who shared both her African homeland and an address in the Washington, D.C., area. Nothing wrong there besides what Chia characterizes as “that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.” As in her previous works of fiction—most recently Americanah (2013)—Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. This style extends into the stories of three other Nigerian women in Chia’s life. Zikora, her best friend, is a tough-minded attorney accustomed to speaking brutal truths to others but vulnerable to ill-starred love affairs with men she thinks of as “thieves of time,” one of whom leaves her while she's pregnant, forcing her to raise a child alone—though not without unexpected help. Kadiatou, Chia’s housekeeper, has overcome challenging odds in raising her gifted daughter, Binta, by herself in America, but is the innocent victim of a sordid scandal that jeopardizes her future. And Chia's cousin, the glamorous, self-possessed Omelogor, is a formidable presence in Nigerian finance but prone to melancholy, rumination, and regret. In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis.

Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.