Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Laila Lalami, Nick Makoha, and Laurène Southe.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Knopf
Date: March 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who grew up in Nigeria has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Dream Count
A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Publisher: Pantheon
Date: March 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin Random House
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, will be out in March 2025.
The Dream Hotel
From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha
Publisher: Penguin
Date: February 27, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Penguin
Nick Makoha
Nicholas Makoha is a dynamic writer born in Uganda and has lived in Kenya, Saudi Arabia and currently resides in London. He is one of ten contemporary poets in the UK to have been selected for Spread the Word’s Complete Works development programme. During the programme he has been mentored by eminent poet George Szirtes, both writers in exile. Nick Makoha was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut Kingdom of Gravity. Bernardine Evaristo and Jackie Kay recommended it in The Guardian’s Best books of 2017. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Malika’s Kitchen Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His poems appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri. As Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Goldsmiths, University of London, he started the filming of Black Metic Poet interviews as part of the Metic experiences of Black British Writers. Nick Makoha’s first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was his 2017 debut.
The New Carthaginians
In The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-’70s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Three characters who are also one – the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.
Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat’s technique of the ‘exploded’ collage, our heroes’ odyssey gathers the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life. ‘Hold that note,’ writes the poet. ‘In this place you are no longer the chorus … In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.’
Child of Congo by Laurène Southe
Publisher: Editions Laurène
Date: February 27, 2025.
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it:
Laurène southe
Laurène is a creative writer and freelance photographer based in Vienna, Austria of Congolese descent. She been published by Brittle Paper, the Shallow Tales Review and recently a part of the ‘African Migration Report Poetry Anthology’. As a multi-discplinary artist, she has also taken part in group exhibitions such as the ‘An Der Schönen Blauen Donau’ by London-based photographer Cameron Ugbodu and ‘House is Not a Home’ by curator and mentor Tonica Hunter.
Child of Congo
In this compelling debut, Laurène delves into the complex intersections of identity, history, and resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity. “Child of Congo” is a poignant exploration of the human spirit, born out of the crucible of conflict and displacement. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, ravaged by decades of internal strife and exploitation, serves as the backbone for this deeply personal journey. These verses weave the struggles of a generation torn between a globalized existence and African heritage. This anthology is not merely a lyrical reflection; it is also a call to action, bringing light to the forgotten underbelly of colonialism and neocolonialism, unveiling hidden truths behind the world’s reliance on Congo’s vital resources. From the horrors of forced labor to the ongoing struggle against rebel groups, these poems bear witness to the darkest history known to mankind. Through the eyes of a child split between worlds, we see the intricate dance of identity formation, cultural legacy, and perseverance. This work provokes readers to confront uncomfortable realities of our interconnected world and the often-overlooked consequences of global politics.
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