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.
