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by Jon Hickey
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.
"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.
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