Sixty years after its first publication, this book returns to Stratis Tsirkas' trilogy to illuminate some "unwritten stories" and unseen aspects of the Ungoverned States.

We follow the political discussion surrounding the Club and the attempts at preemptive censorship of the trilogy by the party mechanisms of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).

Regarding the "hard April" of '44, we see that while the "Middle East movement" initially served for Tsirkas as the reason to do "the work of the historian who was not found," The Bat evolved into a narrative about trauma and memory.

Finally, at a time marking the end of British colonialism in Egypt, we observe how Tsirkas brings to the forefront with Ariadne the voice of the "silent natives," demonstrating both how conflicting and how interconnected the metropolitan and colonial histories are.

With parallel readings of archival documents and the novel, this book explores the relationship between literature and history in one of the most emblematic prose works of the 20th century.