In Ottoman Thessaloniki in 1885, a bland joke, a few looks and some old secrets are enough to start a love affair between a naive and dreamy man and a dynamic woman. In Athens, George I reigns, in Ermoupolis, commerce reigns, and in Thessaloniki, the fog reigns. The two will travel to old Greece and then return to these lands, which years later, through the warm blood of wars, will be called the New Lands. Old and New Countries is a novel about women suffocated by the social collar, about awkward men and voiceless servants in the Belle Époque years, the era called a gift by those who had wealth and power.