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Stakes
  • Published: 2 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781776951031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

Stakes

A memoir

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A darkly funny, sparkling follow-up to the author’s bestselling memoir Grand.

You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you.

Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities of desire.

Twenty years later, exhausted by her unruly appetites, Noelle returns to Dracula, reckoning with her own history and a changing world: generation-spanning shame and trauma given voice by #Metoo and the horrors emerging from Irish soil.

More than a century after readers were first mesmerised by Dracula, Stakes transposes its electric themes of transgression, intoxication and sexual danger onto Noelle’s own life, asking; what's the difference between an inheritance and a curse?

A funny, visceral follow-up to the acclaimed Grand, Stakes celebrates the power of a gothic horror to help you face the parts of life that scare you most.
  • Published: 2 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781776951031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Noelle McCarthy

Noelle McCarthy is an award-winning writer and broadcaster.
Her memoir, Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter, won best first book of non-fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2023.
"Buck Rabbit", her first foray into non-fiction, won the Short Memoir section of the Fish Publishing International Writing competition in 2020.
Since 2017, she and her husband John Daniell have been making critically acclaimed podcasts as Bird of Paradise Productions.
She has written columns, reviews, first-person essays and features for a wide range of media in New Zealand including Metro, The NZ Herald and Newsroom. In Ireland, she’s provided commentary for radio and written for The Irish Times, The Independent and The Irish Examiner.
With nearly twenty years’ experience in radio, she is a go-to host at writer’s festivals and has interviewed some of the world’s most famous and well-respected storytellers, from Eleanor Catton to Marlon James, Margaret Atwood and James Cameron.
She lives in the New Zealand countryside with her husband and their daughter, and she misses Irish chocolate.

portrait photo of Noelle McCarthy

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