Operation Lesbos

Ten-year-old Deniz’s summer vacation, filled with her father’s grief, her mother’s depression and her Aunt Hâle’s secret affairs, will turn into an adventure that surpasses even her own imagination.
Centuries after the return of an Ithacan man from the invasion of Troy, and long after a rich Englishman completed a round-the-world trip in eighty days, in the summer immediately following the injury of Jr in Dallas, the end of Deniz’s dance ‘career’, the Porcelain Incident in which the heirloom dinnerware brought by his grandmother when she emigrated from Thessaloniki was broken, and the September 12 coup d’état, the Ayvalık-Lesbos line becomes the center of extraordinary events.
Deniz, who pursues family secrets like an amateur detective with an appetite for what is going on around him, crosses the ‘borders’ and sails into the choppy waters of migration, population exchange, social transformation, coup, revolutionaries, and history not taught in school, which capsize the world of adults. In the shadow of the menacing pursuit of a Renault 12, our heroes such as Aleko, Şöhret Neco, our ‘Art Sun’ Pasha and ARGUS-2 will accompany Deniz at the helm on this journey of growth.
In her debut novel, Elif Gülez delicately weaves the intertwined events, characters and objects of both personal and social memory into the lines of her adventure. Operation Lesbos carries the reader into the seas of collective memory, culture, history and truth, caught in the current of the original imagination of a child growing up in the 80s.