In Ottoman Thessaloniki of 1885, a bland joke, a few glances, and some old secrets are enough to spark a love affair between a naive and dreamy man and a dynamic woman.

In Athens, George I reigns, in Ermoupolis commerce thrives, and in Thessaloniki, fog envelops the city. The two will travel through old Greece and then return to these places, which years later, through the warm blood of wars, will be called New Lands.

The Old and New Lands is a novel for women who suffocate under social constraints, for awkward men and silent servants during the belle époque, the era that was dubbed gracious by those who possess wealth and power.

It is also a novel about the coastal lighthouses that illuminate the darkness, about the sacredness of water and the sea, about Jules Verne and his books that depict the leaps of imagination, about the romantic human gaze as well as the authoritative eye, about all that, ultimately, is old triumphing and all that is new still has not articulated its name.