Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (Random House Audio, 19 hours and 4 minutes) is the first novel from the Nigerian-born author since 2013’s Americanah. While it deals with similar themes, namely the complexities of navigating one’s place in the African diaspora, it also feels more personal—especially on audio.
The story follows four women, three of them wealthy. Travel writer Chiamaka is enduring the pandemic alone, weighing her regrets about the men in her past. Her best friend Zikora, a lawyer, gets pregnant and must rely on her estranged mother for support, while Chia’s outspoken cousin Omelogor moves through Nigeria’s shady financial world, illegally smuggling money to women-owned businesses. She also writes a blog entitled “Dear Men” and wants to study pornography as a cultural force. In the most harrowing storyline, Chia’s housekeeper, Kadiatou, who wants to provide a better life for her daughter in the U.S., suffers an unthinkable assault and struggles in the aftermath.
The author narrates Chia’s story in a rich, languid manner that feels a bit slow at first. But the style ultimately works to her advantage, the careful, deliberate delivery matching Chia’s wandering inner monologue. Using distinct, skilled narrators Sandra Okuboyejo, A’rese Emokpae, and Janina Edwards for Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou adds a deeply confessional feeling to the novel, grounding each story in unblinking reality.
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In Maggie Su’s hilarious Blob: A Love Story (Harper Audio, 7 hours and 15 minutes), a college dropout finds a sentient pile of goop in the alley behind a bar and, upon discovering she can mold it, decides to shape it into the perfect boyfriend.
If that premise intrigues you, you’re likely to be a fan of this exploration of identity and responsibility. Vi, who grew up in a Midwestern college town with a Taiwanese father, white mother, and successful brother, has never felt at home—not in school or at her job at a motel, not in her now-dead relationship with a fellow student. With Bob the Blob, though, she can call the shots—or so she thinks.
Eunice Wong, who also co-narrates Rachel Khong’s terrific Real Americans, is the funny, sardonic, imperfect Vi, and she sparks compassion despite Vi’s many less-than-endearing qualities.
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You may be able to predict some of the events that take place in Jojo Moyes’ delightful We All Live Here (Penguin Audio, 12 hours and 38 minutes), but that won’t vanquish the pure fun of listening to it. Wonderfully read by actress Jenna Coleman—you may remember her as Clara on Doctor Who—the novel follows the domestic misadventures of a messy, blended family in the U.K.
Forty-something mom Lila is reeling from the one-two punch of a divorce and her mother’s death, coping with a bereft stepfather, two unruly daughters, ill-advised romantic entanglements, and a tumbledown house that’s draining her bank account. Her career is on shaky ground; she gained fame by writing a popular book about how to keep a marriage alive. Now, she needs a new subject. Into this situation steps her estranged biological father, an actor who left decades earlier. Is it too late for him to find a role in this family?
Coleman is terrific here, equally adept at portraying Lila’s rising panic and dismay at her bad choices and conveying the brash bravado of her secretly uncertain teenage daughter.
Connie Ogle is a writer in South Florida.
