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Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Book launch as a cultural event — Adichie's novel homecoming
The Nigerian author's first book in more than a decade was published locally, and Lagos celebrated in true African style. When the announcement of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest novel, Dream Count, was made, it was regarded as a major event in African literature. The internationally celebrated Nigerian writer had not published a novel in the past 12 years, and her long-awaited return stirred both anticipation and speculation. In the post-Covid context in which the book comes, so much has changed in the world. The first leg of her three-city homecoming book tour coincided with my stay in Lagos as a curatorial fellow at Guest Artist Space Foundation, dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange and supporting creative practices. After Lagos, Chimamanda took the tour to Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and finally Enugu, where she was born and grew up. As a scholar of African literature, I arrived here in search of literary Lagos. But my attachment to the city may also just be romantic, a nostalgia born out of years of reading about it in fiction. No doubt, Lagos is a city of imagination and creativity. Chimamanda's book event was a reminder that literary celebrity, when it happens in Africa, can exist on its own terms. It's rooted in a popular imaginary that embraces both the writer and the spectacle. Lagos superstar The launch in Lagos took place at a conference centre on the evening of 27 June. The Muson is a multipurpose civic auditorium located in the centre of Lagos Island which can accommodate up to 1,000 guests. And on this night, the auditorium was packed. When I arrived, the scene outside was buzzing. A crowd gathered in front of a large canvas banner bearing a radiant image of the author. It was more than just decoration; it was a backdrop. It was an occasion for a selfie, a digital marker that you were there. There was even a hashtag for this: #dreamcountlagos. People took turns posing in front of it, curating their presence in the frame of Chimamanda's aura. The atmosphere was festive, electric. And yet beneath the surface shimmer was something more urgent: a hunger for story, for presence, for return. Perhaps that explains why people came not just to witness, but to be counted. Inside the lobby, piles of Chimamanda's books were neatly arranged on long tables. People were not just buying a copy. They were buying several, in the hope that the author would autograph them. The sight was striking, almost surreal. In many parts of the continent, a book launch is often a quiet affair. Writers are lucky to sell a handful of copies. But this was something else entirely. This was not just a book launch, it was nothing short of a cultural moment. It would have been easy to mistake the event for a political townhall. There was a VIP section reserved for the who's who of Lagos, but those class distinctions dissolved into the collective energy of the room. The auditorium was filled with enthusiasm. Even after a delay of more than an hour, when Chimamanda finally walked in, she was met with rapturous applause. She wore a bright yellow dress, an Instagrammable outfit, suited for the many fans who rushed forward to take selfies with her. Chimamanda, no doubt, is as much a fashion icon as she is a literary figure. On stage, she was joined by media personality Ebuka Obi-Uchendu, widely known as the host of the reality TV show Big Brother Africa. But here, he was also something more intimate: the author's friend. Chimamanda even credited him with being a 'great reader'. This is a rare compliment in a literary world that often separates celebrity from any real critical engagement. Their conversation was relaxed and full of laughter, offering the audience both intimacy and insight. Chimamanda addressed the question that had lingered for years: her decade-long silence. She spoke candidly of writer's block, of the grief that came with losing both her parents in quick succession, and how that loss eventually reignited her desire to write. Dream Count, she explained, is shaped by that rupture. It is one of the major post-Covid novels from Africa, and centres on the lives of four women. It is a book about love, friendship and independence. Africans do read When she spoke about her characters on stage, it was as though she was talking about relatives that the audience recognised. They responded by shouting out the characters' names, to the delight of the author. When I asked people about the launch afterwards, many said that it was a very Nigerian event – big, colourful, exuberant, festive. It was indeed a celebration that felt communal, even joyous. It was also a public demonstration of how literature can still command space and attention, not just in private reading rooms or crammed bookstores, but on a civic scale. This was a remarkable event because it defied the tired cliché that Africans do not read. People, mostly young, came out in their hundreds. They bought books, they took selfies with their 'favourite' author, they screamed the names of fictional characters as though greeting friends. But more significant was Chimamanda's choice to work with a local publisher, Narrative Landscape Press, which produced the Nigerian edition of Dream Count that is now available and accessible locally, at the same time as its release in Europe and North America. That alone is a radical act. In returning to Nigeria to launch her book, Chimamanda also disrupts the assumption that African literary prestige must only be validated abroad. Even though she belongs to a cohort of African writers shaped by the diaspora, she actively insists on presence – on homecoming – not as simply nostalgia, but as active engagement. Of course, Chimamanda is an exception. Her stature as a global literary figure, combined with her deep connection to home, allows her to move between worlds with remarkable ease. Few writers command the kind of multigenerational, cross-class attention she does. I found myself wishing, though, that more book launches could carry this same sense of occasion, of meaning, of return. That they could gather people in such numbers, not just to celebrate the writer, but to affirm the African book as something still worth gathering for. And perhaps that is what made this book launch unforgettable: not just the celebrity or the spectacle, but the sense that literature still matters here, and that it belongs to the people. DM
Scotsman
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025: Fiction Highlights
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's been 12 long years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last published a novel, but the reviews for Dream Count are so glowing that it seems it's been worth the wait. One of the stars of festival's Front List, she will be appearing (19 August) on stage at the McEwan Hall, when an appropriately large audience will be able to find out why, according to one review, 'nothing less than the whole female experience' is within the scope of her new book. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie PIC:Ian McEwan (no relation) is a welcome repeat visitor to the festival, and has in the past discussed the difficulty of novelists tackling such a diffuse topic as climate change. On the festival's last day (24 August) Kirsty Wark may be able to draw him out on why he has returned to the subject in his next novel, What We Can Know, out in September. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ian McEwan PIC: Stuartfor BFI Also on the McEwan Hall stage, Maggie O'Farrell (15 August) will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of publishing her debut novel, After You'd Gone. Festival director Jenny Niven will chair the event – and might even get some of the skinny on the filming of Hamnet by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao, starring Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway. Maggie O'Farrell PIC: Dasha Tenditna Back in the Futures Institute, Abdulrazak Gurnah will be discussing Theft, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 (10 August), while Australia's Michelle de Kretser – winner of her country's Stella award only a fortnight ago for Theory and Practice, her genre-bending 'fictional memoir' – makes her festival debut (16 August). The following day, our own genre-bender Ali Smith will be discussing her dystopian book Gliff, which de Krester herself has hailed as 'an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world'. What else? If you're looking for the best of Irish fiction, check out Eimear McBride (21 August) and Colum McCann (18 August); for French, see if Laurent Binet (19 August) can interest you in his epistolary detective story featuring half the artists in the Renaissance; work out if Daniel Kehlmann (9 August) deserves his reputation as the leading German novelist of his generation or why Javier Cercas (19 August) – highly regarded by our own Allan Massie – has long enjoyed similar status in Spain. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad I've only room to cram in a few more favourites, but it's impossible to leave out two great double-bills – Alan Hollinghurst appearing alongside Tash Aw (9 August) and Natasha Brown with Hari Kunzru (22 August) or last year's Man Booker winner Samantha Harvey (14 August). The festival's first Thursday is probably the best day to see Scottish writers, as Ewan Morrison, Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre and Denise Mina are all there to talk about their latest novels (Brookmyre's 30th, Mina's 20th) at separate events.
Hindustan Times
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It is clear that we live in uncertain times what with the climate crisis, an ongoing genocide, and expansionist warfare. And that's just the daily news cycle. This note of utter uncertainty characterises the opening of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count too. The US-based Nigerian writer's long-awaited return to literary fiction comes more than a decade after the widely acclaimed Americanah (2013). It begins with the pandemic and a 'new suspended life' in the midst of what her protagonist Chiamaka terms as the 'communal unknown'. Here, Zoom calls with family and friends become 'a melange of hallucinatory images' and one is constantly reminded of how even the innocent act of talking 'was to remember all that was lost'. Faced with a seeping hopelessness, Chiamaka begins to look up the men from her past, and the 'what could have been' scenarios, the dreams that never became a reality, the futures that never truly were. Thus, begins her 'dream count'. In the face of a 'freewheeling apocalypse', Adichie's protagonist is holding onto that which makes us all human -- the need to be heard and seen through the eyes of another sans judgement. The novel is divided into four main sections with each representing the perspective of one of the story's four central women characters: Chiamaka, her closest friend Zikora, her cousin Omelogor, and her housekeeper Kadiatou. The lives of these four women and all that they have loved and lost is the focus of a narrative that embeds political critique in this representation of desire. What begins as an examination of love in its various shapes and forms, takes on the tone of a social commentary on the 21st century woman's (over)reliance on romantic love. The first partner that Chiamaka's ruminates over is Darnell, whom she calls 'the Denzel Washington of academia'. As Adichie's protagonist comes from a wealthy family, Darnell consistently makes her aware of her privilege vis a vis the poor African migrant struggling for survival in the urban landscapes of the 'Global North'. What follows is a biting satirical portrait of Western academia with Chiamaka calling out its tribal ways and liberal posturing. While meeting Darnell's friends, she notes how they are unable 'to feel admiration' and liberally overuse terms and phrases such as 'problematic' and 'the ways in which'. One of them, Charlotte, 'spoke of Africa as a place where her friends' presumably all white had 'worked'. An Africa 'full of white people all toiling unthanked in the blazing sun'. In a famous TED talk, Adichie had once shared how her 'roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.' It would seem that Adichie is responding to this single story throughout Dream Count. A publisher tells Chiamaka, an aspiring author, to work on something on the Congo before starting her travel memoir, adding that 'Somalia and Sudan could work too'. Chiamaka grasps that the publishing world is viewing her, a woman of African descent, as an 'interpreter of struggles'. Adichie has long contended with the Western gaze on the African diaspora and its 'single story of Africa'. Here too, she critiques the Anglophone publishing world and Western academia's fetishization of Africa and Africans. However, as the narrative progresses, her critique of American 'woke' culture actually does come off as problematic – to use the term that Chiamaka accuses Darnell and his academic circle of overusing. It is through the brash and independent Omelogor that Adichie voices her disdain for liberal America's sense of entitlement and the 'provincial certainty' with which its members operate. Her experience as a graduate student in the US is fraught with encounters that make her wary of expressing any opinion that runs contrary to that which is perceived as ideologically acceptable. It might be useful to note here that Adichie has, in the past, been called out for TERF adjacent remarks and that she has also previously strongly condemned cancel culture in her writing. While the strength of Adichie's narrative lies in how she blends social and political critique through a multi-layered story, it is precisely this which also causes the book to lag in parts. For instance, the arc of Kadiatou's narrative is not entirely convincing. In her Author's Note Adichie shares how this part of the novel was inspired by real life events, in particular, the case of Nafissatou Diallo – a Guinean immigrant, like Kadiatou – who had accused a guest of sexual assault at the hotel where she worked. The accused was IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Adichie notes that she wished to 'right a wrong' through this story. She also shifts to a third person narrative voice here from the first person that she used for both Chiamaka and Omelogor. This creates a distance that doesn't quite work. Indeed, Kadiatou's section and Zikora's too come across as superficial interludes. Dream Count begins with an examination of romantic love as perhaps an extension of the capitalist world view offset by community ties, such as that of sisterhood that may seem to fray at times but remain steady when the need arises. American liberal academia and the publishing world's 'incivility of quiet evil' is explicitly critiqued. 'We are all defining our worlds with words from America,' says Omelogor. There is no arguing with that. Adichie's return to literary fiction does have its moments. In the end, though, it has to be said that, unlike her earlier works, Dream Count suffers from a sad lack of nuance. Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar who lives in Delhi. Her essay 'A Qissa of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh's Short Fiction' was awarded 'Highly Commended' by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
TimesLIVE
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Taking a bite out of Chimamanda's buttered toast
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 4th Estate When reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest offering Dream Count I was reminded of a favourite scene of mine in one of the Narnia books I read as a child. In the scene, the four siblings who must navigate a talking lion, a witch and a precarious wardrobe are so starved that they start craving buttered toast. One of the blandest foods to crave but at that moment of having no other option, even toast would suffice. I also found myself salivating at the thought of sinking my teeth into warm, crunchy bread that crackled at every bite. That hearty scent of rich butter all washed down with orange juice, hot chocolate or tea. I was also with very few options and immediately became enamoured with the hungry siblings and their plight. To this day, buttered toast is a comfort food I always return to. Not as a breakfast or 'girl dinner' but rather as a bite packed with memories that make me feel warm. In Dream Count, Adichie tells the story of four women interlinked by the same desires. Men. The book was inspired by the passing of Adichie's mother and her curiosity about how she would relate to one of the characters, Kadiotou. While this might be an ensemble, Kadiotou's harrowing story is only a common thread that pops up between the other characters. Specifically Chiamaka, who dominates the tale. She and her best friend Zikora have first-person narration, while Kadiotou and Chiamaka's acerbic cousin, Omelogor, have their experiences narrated to us. Through their journeys, we learn a lot about their lives in the way that Adichie has done in books like Half of a Yellow Sun. Chiamaka is a frustrating mess to whom many reading the pages might relate. You either know of a Chiamaka or you have a friend like her. Something of a Nigerian-born Carrie Bradshaw meets Emma Woodhouse, Chiamaka is a funny mess to follow. Particularly when it comes to her ill-fated relationship with her hotep (term typically used for black men who are Afrocentric to a regressive degree) boyfriend, Darnell. Through dinners and dates, we see how Darnell posits himself as a revolutionary intellectual but continues to disappoint Chiamaka, who places a lot of her self-worth on the men she dates. Even in the relationship's end, where Darnell overreacts about Chiamaka ordering a mimosa in a swanky French restaurant in Paris. She dodges his hysteria and starts a relationship with a married man that dissolves as quickly as it started. However, it does give her insight into interracial dating, but does not remedy the assimilation she has to perform when dating men from different backgrounds. Her confidants, Zikora and Omelogor, act as powerful gal pals who are resolute in their disagreements yet cautious enough not to hurt Chiamaka's feelings. Zikora is a golden child who eventually falls for the good guy type in Kwame, before their relationship fizzles out when both parties fail to effectively communicate their thoughts on her pregnancy. This is where the book shines the most as we get left with Zikora's isolation, her perseverance through a pregnancy she was quietly excited about and concludes with endless attempts to keep in touch with Kwame. In what Adichie describes as an 'unfinished dying', the labour of falling out of love and in connection with her soul mate is heartbreaking and nearly makes the book a literary realism masterpiece were it not for the cracks that start to show. Kadiotou's story is told in third-person narrative because of Adichie's respect for the real-life events it was inspired by. However, Omelogor, who runs a microblog, is also not given the honour of telling her own tale. As one of the more exciting women in terms of her world views, this makes Omelogor an anticlimactic character to read about. With Adichie employing the same linguistics when writing in Zikora and Chiamaka's voices, it often feels like they play big brother over Kadiotou and Omelogor's lives as there are no distinct differences in how she retells each woman's tale. Their passivity also makes them feel like one woman in four different versions of a Marvel multiverse, à la their very own What If series. This is where Adichie becomes a buttered toast author. There are no surprises with butter toast, and neither are there any with Adichie's book. You know what you are going to get: page after page of women pining over men, their mothers pining over grandkids and their female relatives pining over their dowager lives. It is a void obsessed with women who are stereotypes; the flighty columnist, the pregnant, shrewd lawyer, the middle-aged woman obsessed with pornography and the poverty-stricken outlier who is fodder for the haves and the have-nots. Perhaps fuelled by being a member of the queer community, there is nothing new to Dream Count. Nothing profound in its obsession with the mundane and its characters who are not daring enough to try something new. In a failure to explore the feelings an desires of women in their forties to fifties, Dream Count is a perfect read for chick-lit lovers who wish to be affirmed in their beliefs with the promise of excellent prose.
New Indian Express
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
The weary weight of womanhood
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count explores the lives of three Nigerian women, Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor, and one Guinean woman, Kadiatou, and their dreams and destinies. Chiamaka, a travel writer, recalls her past lovers as she is stuck at home during the Covid pandemic. Zikora is a successful lawyer who believes she has failed at other aspects of life. Omelogor is a banker who launders money to help poor women start their businesses. Kadiatou works in housekeeping at a hotel where she faces a tragedy that upends the life she had built for herself and her daughter in America. What unites these women is the resilience they have had to build to survive in a world that is tainted with misogyny and violence. Through Chiamaka, Adichie captures the emotional exhaustion brought on by the covid pandemic. 'Every morning, I was hesitant to rise, because to get out of bed was to approach again the possibility of sorrow,' she writes. She recalls her relationship with a man, Darnell, which had turned into an obsession. With Darnell, Chiamaka had to fight for every morsel of intimacy. Darnell mocked her for her wealth while he enjoyed the benefits of the same wealth – fancy birthday trips, expensive gadgets, fine wine and dining. Chia wants to talk to Omelogor about Darnell but resists doing so because she is afraid of the self-respect and strength Omelogor brings out in her. When Chia finally finds a man who seems dream-like, she realises her desires might differ from what society wants her to desire.
