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Stakes
Noelle McCarthy
  • Published: 2 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781776951031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Stakes

A memoir

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

What’s the difference between an inheritance and a curse? Vampirism is an ancient evil, Van Helsing says, but it still had to come from somewhere.
Noelle McCarthy wakes up in a man’s bed on the far side of the world with no memory of how she got there. The hangover is bad; the shame is worse.

She’s thirty, Irish, a rising voice on New Zealand radio, yet life has narrowed to the next drink, the next act of self-destruction, the blank spaces in her memory. It feels maddeningly inevitable, a family script playing out.

As a child, to escape the mercurial Mammy and oppressive Cork environs, Noelle turned to books. But with higher stakes at play, could retracing Stoker’s steps save her again? If you invite in the fictional vampire, can you learn to recognise the real ones?

A luminous new work that interweaves and expands on Grand, Stakes is a memoir about inheritance and Ireland, self-abandonment and self-acceptance, Dracula, and the secret to happiness.
  • Published: 2 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781776951031
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00
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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