Stakes: A Memoir
by Noelle Mccarthy
AUCK IN STOCK
WGTN IN STOCK
320
2 Jun 2026
Trade Paperback
Penguin New Zealand
Penguin New Zealand
9781776951031
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.
Noelle McCarthy does it again! Following on from her first book, Grand, Stakes is another glorious and visceral memoir… but this time with vampires. McCarthy traverses a lot: sensorily transportive memories of messy Irish teenage drinking nights and diabolical hangovers in an Auckland apartment, the unfurling horror of the traumas her mother endured before her birth, research on Bram Stoker and reflection on all that the vampire comes to stand for in our collective imagination, and more even than this. Stakes is a richer text than I can explain on a tiny card, but one which masterfully synthesises its plurality of textual threads to a poignant conclusion. (insert vampire emoji here).
Amelia, Unity Books wellington
