This week Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returned with her first novel in over a decade. Dream Count (Fourth Estate) is a “scintillating account of the trials of four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment”, wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr at the Sunday Times, that reads “as a compendium of every hardship women and girls can endure”. She added: “I’ve read a number of powerful scenes of sexual assault in fiction but none, until now, that have made me cry tears of rage.” Dream Count is a “magnificent novel” that reads “like a feminist War and Peace. It is an account of the war waged against women – by society, yes, but also by their bodies”. Writing for the New Statesman, Nicola Sturgeon called Dream Count a “complex, multi-layered beauty of a book” that is “deeply and richly feminist”. Describing it as an “extraordinary” novel, Sturgeon declared that “the book’s lessons on life and the world we inhabit are not thrust didactically at the reader but considered through the profoundly human experience of [Adichie’s] characters”.
Show Don’t Tell (Doubleday), the second collection of short stories from Curtis Sittenfeld, was praised by Alex Clark at the Observer. “Many of her protagonists, who are often also narrating their own stories, find themselves in middle age, in domestic and familial circumstances of varying contentedness and stability; and whatever their feelings towards husband, wife, children or job, they are inclined towards looking back, perhaps to stave off the less certain prospect of looking forward.” Clark concluded: “Throughout, Sittenfeld successfully deploys her brand of low-key, sardonic wit, which combines a clever and sensitive understanding of pleasure and the pain of nostalgia.” Writing for the Financial Times, Lionel Shriver called Show Don’t Tell “brilliant”, concluding: “I know, I know. Even if you’re a fiction reader, you far prefer novels – as do I, as a rule. Well, think again: if you’re not into short stories, you’re just reading the wrong ones. Read these.”
The Telegraph’s Nicholas Lezard picked journalist Alexander Clapp’s “investigative” book Waste Wars (John Murray), writing that “it’s hard to imagine any reasonably affluent Western reader…reading this and not having their conception of the world fundamentally changed”. Clapp “spent years travelling round the slums of the planet” to see what happens to our electronic waste and came “to the conclusion that the default human activity for much of the world now is not farming: it’s picking through vast heaps of toxic rubbish”. The Observer’s Andrew Anthony noted: “In a sense, it’s a kind of critique of capitalist consumption and its economic disparities made by looking not at the buying power but throwing away power of the wealthy. It’s a book about how the global north dumps on the global south.”
Gareth Russell’s Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King (HarperCollins) is a “balanced biography that deals adroitly with important background events”, remarked Gerard DeGroot at the Sunday Times, and not just the “sex life of Britain’s most openly gay monarch”. Russell offers a “very intimate portrait; James comes alive in full flamboyance” and the author “expertly weaves the bedchamber gossip into the tapestry of a tumultuous reign. The book is serious when it needs to be and fun when appropriate.” The Guardian’s Thomas W Hodgkinson noted that Russell pens a “sober, rounded portrait” of James I “which rescues him from the caricature, product of later parliamentarian bias”. It is a “confident, compelling” biography.
