-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
There, There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe's Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack's reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack's estranged sister and Mitch's former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.
But when an accident claims the life of Mitch's mentor, a power broker in the reservation's political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation's descent into violence.
Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award 2026
Here is an interesting award recognizing distinguished fiction that tells American stories in a uniquely American voice, one that reflects Mark Twain's incisive curiosity and humanity. Celebrating its tenth year. Longlist 2026 Are You Happy?: Stories — Lori Ostlund Atavists: Stories — Lydia Mille...
-Anne_Glasgow
"It's not hard to see the events in this small community as an allegory for larger themes of corruption in the Trump era, but Hickey avoids big symphonic flourishes and instead emphasizes the cost to individuals. A big-minded book about small-town politics." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Though the prose can be clunky...there's a great deal of satisfaction in watching Hickey gradually peel back the layers of Mitch's ambition, bravado, and questionable ethics to reveal his vulnerabilities, especially as the political machine begins to falter during the increasingly explosive election season. It's a fresh take on the political novel." —Publishers Weekly
"Hickey's polished debut novel takes place in a few fraught days preceding an election at the fictional Passage Rouge Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin...At its heart, this is a novel about the difficulties of belonging to a family or a community while plagued by an unsettled conscience and about the ways in which ambition and power can have drastic results on any playing field." —Booklist
"Big Chief is an explosive exploration of power and its corrupting effect. Jon Hickey takes us on a feverish journey in the days leading up to a hotly contested tribal election, where loyalties are being sharply tested, and the lines between right and wrong have become blurred. I found myself holding my breath as I turned the page -- as the characters struggled to figure out how to be on the right side of history. This book is an astounding achievement." —Vanessa Chan, nationally bestselling author of The Storm We Made
"An instant American classic! Out of the dark fields of the republic, Mitch Caddo rises to great heights, only to lose his soul in the process. But like all great American novels, there is hope—in the end, there is always hope. Jon Hickey locks arms with Alexie, Silko, Orange, Erdrich and others who are taking back a landscape that was once all theirs." —Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams
This information about Big Chief was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and The Madison Review. Jon lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
If you liked Big Chief, try these:
by Ondjaki
Published 2024
A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.
by Michael Farris. Smith
Published 2023
In this "tense, brooding" novel, a young woman returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory to find the girl who may be a savior in the apocalypse. (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
by Simon Han
Published 2021
From the outside, the Chengs seem like so-called model immigrants. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn't this what they sacrificed so much for?
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
