To walk into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stately brick home outside Baltimore is to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that small children live there. It’s not that the kitchen floor is a Lego minefield or that the double staircase is lined with low-hanging fingerprints — quite the opposite. It’s that the house rings with expectancy, as if biding time until the next step in a carefully choreographed routine, which, if you think about it, isn’t all that different from the mood in the lead-up to a much-anticipated book.

For Adichie, that book is “Dream Count,” her fourth novel, coming out on March 4. Forged during the most difficult period of Adichie’s life, it explores the braided lives of four African women, with motherhood as a load-bearing wall.

In real life, Adichie has a 9-year-old daughter and 10-month-old twin sons, who materialized briefly in a blaze of succulent-cheeked glory. It was clear, as she bounced a baby on each hip and pointed to the spot where her daughter took her first steps, that Adichie is enjoying, as she put it, “being a mama.”

But the central inspiration for “Dream Count” came from her own mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie, who died in March 2021. The book is dedicated to her.

“I was not consciously aware that I was writing a novel about my mother,” Adichie said. “I thought I was writing a novel about female connection.”

Later she said, “I just want her to come back.”