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Gratefully, Adichie is back to fiction with “Dream Count,�� a rich, complicated book that spans continents and classes. The story jets between America and Nigeria while rotating, section by section, through the experiences of four Black women. Moving through a comedy of manners and a hall of horrors, their stories overlap and intersect in ways that suggest the vast matrix of the African diaspora.

Chiamaka �� known as Chia �� opens the novel by saying, “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.�� The plaintive vulnerability of that confession vibrates through the next 400 pages as we meet Chia’s female friends, relatives and servants. Despite their diverse stations, in lives stretched more than 5,000 miles around the globe, they all crave the kind of intimacy that eludes them. There may be many stories here, but every single one contends with the unreliability, the unavailability and even the violence of men. That theme could be limiting or redundant, too familiar to be engaging, but the extraordinary sympathy of Adichie’s storytelling makes “Dream Count�� deeply compelling.

Chia is the daughter of a wealthy man, which gives her the freedom to pursue an interest in travel writing long before she has any actual assignments. But the covid pandemic has snuffed out that career �� along with all other activities. Cocooned in her parents�� house in Maryland, Chia Zooms with friends and family. “Every morning,�� she laments, “I was hesitant to rise, because to get out of bed was to approach again the possibility of sorrow.��

Chia’s mother warns her that at 44, she’s running out of time. “I did not have a husband and I did not have a child,�� she admits wryly, “a calamity more confounding because it was not for lack of suitors.�� Still, overwhelmed with paranoia and regret, Chia begins Googling past boyfriends, what a friend calls her “body count�� but Chia thinks of as her “dream count.�� It’s an exercise that satisfies her curiosity �� and ours �� even as it opens up old wounds. There’s....

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