General admission tickets for this event are sold out. To attend the event, you can purchase season subscriptions for the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series here.
Tickets for an online rebroadcast of the event are available here
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will read from her new novel Dream Count, followed by an on-stage conversation led by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing.
MacArthur Fellow 
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born in Nigeria, is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was a 2007 Orange Prize winner and a New York Times Notable Book; and Americanah, which the Los Angeles Times describes as “part love story, part social critique, and one of the best books you’ll read this year.” San Francisco Chronicle called the book, “dazzling… funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise.” Her other books include the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.
Chimamanda returns to Houston with her new novel Dream Count, which follows the lives of four women: Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer stranded in pandemic-lockdown America, who grapples with past choices and regrets; Zikora, her best friend, a successful lawyer brokenhearted by betrayal, who must turn to the person she thought she needed least; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s outspoken cousin, a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself; and Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, who is raising her daughter in America, but faces a hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. According to The New York Times, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in a dozen years, is dreamy indeed. An accumulation of scenes and sensations, cloudlike in their contour, floating… against the backdrop of the pandemic that messed up sleep — and time itself — for us all.”
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature and cultural studies. A former ethnic media editor and freelance essayist, she writes widely on contemporary literature, media, and politics. Srinivasan is co-editor of the award-winning Thinking with an Accent (2023), co-author of the epistolary memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (2025), and author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025). Her editorial work spans volumes on the legacies of 1990s theory, the fate of the postcolonial, the Asian Century, and pandemic fiction. Her next book, What is We?, is forthcoming.
