Immie

When a small, ancient Irishman appears on a school fence post eating a cheese sandwich, entirely invisible to almost everyone - fifteen-year-old Immie Whitfield is not entirely surprised. She has always been able to see things other people can't. She has always been able to draw fictional characters carefully enough that they step off the page and speak to her. She has, in short, always known the world was stranger than it appeared.

She doesn't know her estranged grandfather is a magician. She doesn't know that an organisation called the Collectors has been watching her family for years. She doesn't know that her grandfather's time is running out - and that she is destined to inherit his gift.

Immie meets her grandfather, Archibald Whitfield, for the first time, learns the true nature of what she has inherited and will inherit, and builds a circle of magically gifted allies.

When the trail leads to a cross-continental journey on the Indian Pacific and a reckoning with five bound spirits who have waited too long to be free, Immie must understand what her gift actually is - not threads, not tone, but something rarer: the ability to make things real by paying them full attention.

Immie is a novel about inherited gifts and inherited silences. About the cost of protection that becomes absence. About a family that has been broken for thirty years and is trying, carefully and honestly, to repair itself. And about a fifteen-year-old girl from Perth who refuses to look away from people - and discovers that this, more than anything, is where the magic lives.

Patrick Maher spins curious tales of imagination and mystery, set in other times and other worlds for readers of all ages, where psychic abilities, science, and medicine can easily leap about in the playground of the mind together. His stories are set in worlds that seem normal but one step removed, where deep, enduring friendships are valued.