the long white cloud, gallipoli

#1 NATIONAL BEST SELLER In the year 2000, a young woman from New Zealand visits a village in Gallipoli, Turkey, accompanied by a tourist guide. Through her translator, she tells the villagers that she is the great-grand daughter of a well-respected World War I veteran who is in fact a Turkish hero. She claims that the Turkish patriot and war hero who spent his life in a Gallipoli village was actually the New Zealander soldier who joined the British forces fighting against the Turks at Gallipoli during World War I. The village and eventually the whole country are scandalized by the claim that a Turkish war hero was actually an ANZAC (Australian and New Zealander Army Corps.) soldier. Turkish politicians, historians, national intellegence agents and the press frantically take up the issue, using its evocation of patriotism and nationalism to cover up the country�s current problems. Yet British and Ocenean diplomats seem disturbed as well and gave immediate denials on the issue in press conferences. The Turkish Press harasses the young New Zealander woman and tries to create a scandal around her. Meanwhile, she finds out that the Turkish war hero�schildren are named Uzun (Long), Beyaz (White) and Bulut (Cloud) - making the puzzle more interesting and complicated as the New Zealand Islands are called �Long White Cloud� (Aotearoa) by the native people of Mauris. Beyaz Hala (known as Auntie Beyaz), the only living child of the Turkisah war hero, is an 80-year-old wise woman. Auntie Beyaz gives her father�s letters to the New Zealander woman, who finally understands that she is not the paranoid daydreamer that the press and the villagers think her to be. While the novel progress the reader finds out clues about a deadly secret has been kept by Auntie Beyaz for 80 years. The letters of Auntie Beyaz�s father was written by an young Ottoman Turkish officer- a law student in 1915 who fought for the Ottoman Empire seem dilluted into the letters of young New Zealander woman�s great-grand father who was a young farmer from Wellington area who fought for the British Empire in Gallipoli. Then the main question of the novel appears as: CAN THE VERY SAME MAN BE THE WAR HERO IN TWO CONTRIES WHICH FOUGHT AS ENEMIES ? Is it a possible case and/or if it is possible can the public, the political and military forces of any country in the world mature enough to accept and /or to discuss such an extraordinary case yet? Meantime, the New Zelander woman meets a distant cousin, a young, handsome, charismatic and prominent young lawyer in Istanbul. Her relationship with him becomes emotional intense and emotionally difficult. She and he realize that they might have the same great-grandfather and their discussions about naionalism and national identity generate the novel�s intellectual debate. In the end when she goes back to New Zealand she was sure that her great-grand father and his-once �brave enemy� Turkish officer gave a great lesson to the world while the world is not ready to hear. And she knows that she will come back to Gallipoli again. What did they say about the novel? Fascinating! Ms. Uzuner is written such an epic novel on war which very few writers had ever managed in the literary world.� Prof. T.S. Halman Dean of the Bilkent University, Turkish Literature Dept. Ankara (former Dean of the New York University, Near Eastern Studies Faculty, USA) An epic masterpiece which is built on the bridge of the East and West from Homeros to Sultan Mehmet the Conqurer, and from Sultan Mehmet to Ataturk and up to our modern times.� Prof. Emre Kongar Social scientist and writer GALLIPOLI is sold 50.000 copies in 3 months time in Turkey #1 in best selleing lists for 6 months. The novel is sold 120.000 copies by January 2003 Ms. Buket Uzuner's new novel GALLIPOLI on the billboards in Istanbul and Ankara.