Anna McGahan’s IMMACULATE is the 2023 winner of The Australian / Vogel’s Award for Young Writers that has launched the careers of over a hundred Australian authors, including Anna’s uncle, beloved Australian novelist Andrew McGahan. The award is one of Australia’s richest and most prestigious awards for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five.

All Frances wants is a cure for her daughter, but that would take a miracle, and miracles aren’t something Frances believes in anymore.

Newly divorced from her pastor ex-husband and excommunicated from the church community she once worked within, she wrestles alone with the prognosis of her terminally ill child. Any suggestion of ‘divine intervention’ is salt in the wound of her grief. So when Frances is forced to take in a homeless and pregnant teenage girl who claims to have had an immaculate conception, she’s deeply challenged.

But sixteen-year-old Mary is not who she seems, and soon opens the door to perspectives that profoundly shift Frances’s sense of reality, triggering a chain of astonishing events. It seems that where there is the greatest suffering lies an unexpected magic. Frances begins to hold hope for her family’s future, but the miracle prayed for is not always the one received.

IMMACULATE is a provocative and tender exploration of loss, identity and healing, and the secret worlds we hide within in order to survive.

Publisher Allen and Unwin

ISBN 9781761067990