Chimamanda longlisted for 2025 women’s prize for fiction
By Adeola Ogunrinde
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 for her novel Dream Count.
Adichie in the past had been shortlisted for her three previous novels ,Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.
Dream Count tells the story of Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalled 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 on 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 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist
The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:
Good Girl by Aria Aber (published by Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (published by Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette)
Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches (published by Scotland Street Press)
Amma by Saraid de Silva (published by Weatherglass Books)
Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (published by Holland House Books)
All Fours by Miranda July (published by Canongate Books)
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell (published by Scribner, Simon & Schuster)
A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike (published by Fig Tree, Penguin General, Penguin Random House)
Birding by Rose Ruane (published by Corsair, Little, Brown Book Group, Hachette)
The Artist by Lucy Steeds (published by John Murray, John Murray Press, Hachette)
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House)
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House)
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, Hachette)
