The Ndola Muto Salon
A Novel
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Publishing:12th Jan '27
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 12th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
At the Ndola Muto Salon Douala, Cameroon, women slip behind closed doors to seek pleasure, refuge, and one another. When young Violette begins work there as a courtesan for women to support her family, she enters a world her mother cannot accept, where desire moves quietly but powerfully. Part sanctuary, part hidden house of pleasure, the salon becomes a mirror of empowerment, longing, and possibility beyond the restrictions of Cameroonian society. Within its walls, Violette encounters a constellation of women who shape her awakening: Lady Budu, the formidable owner; Caroline, who first opens her to joy; and the enigmatic Lady with Sexy Toes, who urges her to imagine a life of her own making. As these lives intertwine in this evocative novel, the salon reveals how tenderness between women can become an act of resistance, defying patriarchy, class, and convention in small but profound revolutions.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
"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
ISBN: 9781684486267
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 453g
158 pages