Michael Robert Liska

In 1856, Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird, an aging officer in the United States Navy, makes an extraordinary discovery on a remote Pacific island: a young, speechless girl living alone in the aftermath of a shipwreck. Naming her Alice, Bird takes her aboard his ship and eventually brings her to San Francisco, where he presents her to the public as the “Wild Girl of the Pacific.” To the crowds, Alice is a scientific curiosity and a spectacle; to Bird, she is both a responsibility and an opportunity to restore his fading reputation. But Alice is not content to remain an object of fascination or a prisoner of someone else’s ambitions. As she struggles to reclaim control over her life, she must navigate the unfamiliar world of nineteenth-century America, where freedom can prove as elusive as it was on the island. Blending historical fiction, maritime adventure, dark humour, and social satire, Liska explores exploitation, loneliness, and the power of storytelling. The novel asks who has the right to define another person’s identity—and whether true independence is ever entirely within our grasp.