WHAT BELONGS TO THE DEAD

A provenance certificate places a Benin ceremonial mask in a Brussels private collection in 1991. A UNESCO inventory places the same mask in the Benin National Museum in September 1993. Both documents cannot be telling the truth. When Nigerian-American scholar Adaeze uncovers this impossibility buried in an estate catalog, she has fourteen days before the mask sells at auction and disappears again. But she also has her grandmother's notebook: a composition book kept in secret across four months of 1993, recording every visit the American diplomat made to the museum, every storage room he entered, every object Mama Chioma watched leave and never return. Moving between Benin City in 1993 and Boston in the present, What Belongs to the Dead is a novel about stolen objects and the stories that survive them, about the witnesses who cannot stop what they see and the children who inherit their silence, and about what justice demands when the law and the right thing do not point in the same direction.