"Frieda Ekotto has done it again, taking queer imaginations to unprecedented heights and unfathomable depths. In The Ndola Muto Salon, readers are invited into a rich tapestry of queer pleasure, freedom dreams, and captivating family intrigue."—Naminata Diabate, author of Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa

"Frieda Ekotto does not soften what is at stake. The Ndola Muto Salon is a precise, unsentimental novel about desire, constraint, and the cost of living against the grain of one's world. Ekotto writes with clarity and control, attentive to what cannot be spoken as much as to what is."—Jude Dibia, author of The Quiet That Remains

"With The Ndola Muto Salon, Frieda Ekotto confirms herself as the preeminent novelist of queer African life. Violette's initiation into a clandestine house of courtesans in Douala unfolds with intimacy, grief, and erotic intelligence. Few writers render desire, family, and literary inheritance with such fearless tenderness."—Ayo A. Coly, author of Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women's Discourses of the Female Body

"The Ndola Muto Salon offers the kind of against-the-grain, queer coming-of-age story we need to expand imaginaries. The short novel exposes often-silenced experiences, much like Violette who refuses to follow the norms imposed upon her. Violette and the women that surround her bring a behind-the-scenes Douala to life, showing some of its contradictions to compose an erotic, powerful, complex portrait of being a woman navigating expectations and aspirations."—Marion Tricoire, associate professor of French, Grinnell College