Early into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, narrator Chiamaka, or “Chia,” muses on the two women who matter most to her. There is her best friend, “organized, buttoned-up, ambitious” Zikora, a successful lawyer who has been less fortunate in marriage. There is her cousin Omelogor, a former banker, who is bracingly forthright and ruthlessly single-minded. Then there is Chia herself, a travel writer with nowhere to travel to during lockdown, who spends her days ruminating on everything from absent friends to lost lovers to the way her life has panned out. “But what is the final measure for making the most of life,” she asks herself, “and how would I know if I have?”

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In Dream Count, Adichie tells the interlaced stories of these women, chronicling their choices, aspirations, desires, and disappointments while they navigate their own paths and follow their own agendas either in their native Nigeria or in their adopted America. As they falter and thrive, more often than not at the expense of men, Adichie skillfully examines the emotional cost of their struggles.

The book’s first section centers on Chia. Cocooned and frustrated during the pandemic in her house in Maryland, she tries to take advantage of “this collective sequestering” by jogging on her treadmill and turning old notes into new travel pieces. Instead, she lazes around in bed, looking back on and taking stock of her “dream count” — that is, her exes, all of whom, for some time at least, offered her the prospect of a shared future together.

One man who left his mark was art history scholar Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia.” Over the course of three years, he made Chia feel small and inadequate by prioritizing his own needs, questioning her judgments, and wounding her with snide barbs about her hormones or her parents’ wealth. “He squashed my smallest pleasures,” she reveals, “and I helped him flatten them, sinking myself into the mean crevices of his will.” Matters came to a head in Paris: She planned to “blur his edges” there, but her presence only sharpened them.

Chia recounts a less turbulent relationship with stable and dependable Chuka, whose heart she was eventually forced to break: “I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.” She is dealt a surprise blow when she falls head over heels with an Englishman and learns that he is already married.

For her next section, Adichie turns the spotlight on Zikora. Instead of continuing from her character’s perspective, she creates a little distance between her subject and her reader by switching to a third-person narrative. Zikora’s backstory incorporates her earlier years in Nigeria, in particular her response to her father’s decision to take a second wife, a woman who, we are memorably told, “wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife,” and her disastrous love affairs with callous, ne’er-do-well men she regards as “thieves of time.” Equally absorbing is Zikora’s present situation in Washington. She is about to give birth, but Kwame, the boyfriend who abandoned her, isn’t answering her calls. Fortunately, an unlikely source of support may be at hand.

Readers expecting Adichie to devote her third part to Omelogor will find themselves wrongfooted. Omelogor does not feature yet. More importantly, Adichie’s novel is not a triptych of Nigerian women. She adds an extra panel here and tells the tale of a character she has only mentioned fleetingly: Kadiatou, Chia’s housekeeper. At first glance, the story may seem superfluous. But after a fashion, as Kadiatou’s plight binds Adichie’s other women, it becomes clear that this chapter, the most powerful in the book, amounts not just to a welcome addition but a vital one.

Growing up in Guinea, Kadiatou suffers one hardship or tragedy after another. When a childhood sweetheart helps her and her child apply for asylum in America, she seizes the opportunity and makes a new start in what she assumes will be a “land of ease.” But one day while at work cleaning hotel rooms, she is sexually assaulted by a guest — a “white VIP.” The case makes international headlines, and Chia and her friends follow it closely. To begin with, Kadiatou’s biggest concern is losing her job — later, in court, it is being believed.

In a lesser writer’s hands, a subsequent chapter would be overshadowed by this one. However, Adichie maintains momentum with Omelogor’s wiles and schemes. Disillusioned with her work at the “putrid center” of Nigerian finance where she “learned to paint fraud in pretty colors,” Omelogor puts her hard-won expertise to better use by siphoning off funds from her corrupt employer and redistributing it to poor women to start small businesses. She later quits her job to study pornography at graduate school in America and, in turn, set up a website giving advice to men in need. But beneath her bold exterior, just how content and in control is she?

Dream Count is Adichie’s first novel in over a decade and one of the most anticipated novels of the year. The question for many will be: is it worth the wait and the hype? The answer is a resounding yes. It could have been a retread of Adichie’s previous novel, Americanah (2013), with its American and Nigerian settings and its gaze on the immigrant experience. It could also have been a straightforward account of a string of failed relationships. But Adichie has covered more ground, both thematically and tonally, and the result is not just a compelling study of four West African women but also an astute and profound exploration into family and friendship, power and privilege, race and identity, motherhood and womanhood.

In certain standout episodes, Adichie vividly conveys her characters’ joy and pain, from the “queasy euphoria” of love to the sting of betrayal. In one scene, Chia is excited about an editor’s interest in her proposal for a “light and quirky” travel book, but that elation quickly curdles into sadness when she is asked to change her focus and, as an African, write about war in Sudan and struggles in Congo. Kadiatou’s devastating hotel-room incident, a fictionalized treatment of the allegation made against International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011, unfolds unflinchingly. We read on with trepidation to discover if Kadiatou, described earlier as a woman who “dreamed only of achievable things,” will get the justice she deserves.

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The novel’s many views and voices provide color and variety. Omelogor’s opinions on both places she has called home prove insightful. She makes a case as to why America is “so provincial” and argues that “it’s not that Nigeria is poor, it’s that it’s virulently materialistic.” Interfering aunts and meddlesome mothers pop up to chide women for leaving it too late to marry and have children, always in a way that is “benignly blunt, as Nigerians are wont.” And then there are the weaselly, crafty, or abrasive words of the book’s men, the majority of whom are feckless, hapless, ruthless, or, in some cases, lawless.

At one point, Chia explains that finding a man is not her priority. “More than marriage, I was looking for what I then did not know as the resplendence of being truly known.” Such is the strength of Adichie’s characterization that by the end of her superb novel, we know Chia and the other perfectly rendered women inside out.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.