India, May 30 -- 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". ...