255. The Spider King's Daughter by Chibundu Onuzo
The Spider King's Daughter (Faber and Faber, 2012; 288) by Chibundu Onuzo is a tale that dissects and spreads open the economic duality - that divide that puts people at the extreme ends of the economic continuum - of most nations, especially those in Africa. It breathes life into an article - Duality: Dickens in Lagos, and Asimov too - I wrote in response to a one-sided argument provided at one of these mentally-skewed journalists. The Spider King's Daughter is about a happenstance meeting between a girl - Abike - from a wealthy family and a street-hawker, Runner-G and the consequences that came with it. And as you can rightly guess, the chance meeting provided the necessary spark that glowed into love or unlove, as the reader will find out. Yes, these things do happen; and yes, they have been written about since the seventeenth century. But there is more and this is where Chibundu twisted things. As the relationship evolved from street-side meetings to poolside co...