Adichie’s Dream Count Returns to Nigeria with emotional readings, record-breaking crowds, and a powerful literary tour reconnecting the author to her roots
In a season when global publishing looked to Nigeria with fresh admiration, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returned home in June to a thunderous welcome.
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Her latest novel, Dream Count, released globally in March, launched a nationwide literary wave as the award-winning author embarked on a multi-city tour, drawing record-breaking crowds and reigniting national discourse around identity, memory, and womanhood.
Her first longform fiction in over a decade, Dream Count has been called a “feminist War and Peace” by The Times UK, and quickly sold out in major Nigerian bookstores within weeks of release.
The Nigerian leg of the tour opened on April 25 at Roving Heights Bookstore, Landmark Centre, Lagos.
What was expected to be a modest signing ballooned into a cultural spectacle.
Over 600 readers queued for hours to meet the author, whose warmth and patience turned the signing into a near-spiritual experience.
Adichie signed books for seven uninterrupted hours, pausing only to hug, joke, or listen to fans’ personal stories—many of them young Nigerian women who had grown up reading Purple Hibiscus or Dear Ijeawele.
“It felt like church. People were crying, laughing, and praying all at once,” said Kelechi O., a 26-year-old reader who attended the event.
The event’s cultural impact was amplified by its visual grace—Adichie, known for her fashion-forward intellect, wore a sleek green jumpsuit by Emmy Kasbit, affirming her signature blend of literary brilliance and style.
Before the Nigerian stops, Adichie had launched Dream Count with high-profile appearances in London, Paris, and New York.
Her UK launch at Southbank Centre sold out in under 24 hours, with attendees describing her reading as “lyrical and fearless.”
In an interview with Vogue’s podcast, she reflected on overcoming writer’s block, grief, and the burden of expectations.
“I’m no longer writing to impress,” she said. “I’m writing to remember—and to insist that memory matters.”
In Nigeria, the tour gained emotional resonance.
I’m no longer writing to impress. I’m writing to remember—and to insist that memory matters.
After the Lagos event, Adichie travelled to Abuja and Enugu, continuing a deeply personal journey that combined public readings, university visits, and advocacy.
Adichie also visited Nsukka, where she delivered a guest lecture at the University of Nigeria, her father’s former academic home and the setting for her acclaimed novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
She was also the keynote speaker at the first-ever “Things Fall Apart Literary Festival,” an event timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s classic.
“Being here feels like coming full circle,” she told students at UNN.
“The land remembers. So must we.”
Adichie’s readings in Enugu, held at a candle-lit amphitheatre, included selections from Dream Count that explore intergenerational memory, the psychic cost of ambition, and what it means to inherit silence.
Set in Lagos, Abuja, and a fictional coastal town, Dream Count traces the life of Amaka, a once-revolutionary lawyer turned reclusive writer, as she confronts the ghosts of a war-torn past and the compromises of motherhood.
Critics have praised Adichie’s narrative confidence, with The Times UK calling it her “most emotionally intelligent novel yet.”
More than just a series of public appearances, Adichie’s Dream Count tour emerged as a cultural reckoning as much as a celebration.
In city after city, it offered not just readings, but reflections on power, history, womanhood, and the fragile act of remembering.
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And for the readers who stood in line, pages in hand, the tour offered a moment of shared recognition with a writer whose words had long lived in their heads and who, in return, came home to listen.
