Good-Bye? Bad-Bye? is the secret question that Melia and Myrto exchange just before going to sleep. Two little sisters living on an Aegean island in 1936 listen to their grandfather talk endlessly about his "ancients," eagerly awaiting to reunite with their friends as summer approaches, but above all, they go crazy over the magical stories told by their cousin Nikos, a student from Athens.

The kaplani -as they call it on the island-, a stuffed tiger, is locked inside the display case of the grand hall of their house, sometimes looking with its blue eye and sometimes with its black eye, depending on its mood. What happens on a warm August day that shakes up the lives of the girls and their family? Who wants to harm the kaplani?

"Alki Zei must, I think, be acknowledged as a literary phenomenon. The book, with its natural seamless flow -you laugh on every page- illuminates and teaches. It places a finger on the wounds that have long oppressed and tormented Greek life..." Elli Alexiou