Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Big Chief | 2025 | Buy |
Jon Hickey writes from the inside out. An enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Hickey grew up away from his ancestral homeland in northern Wisconsin after his grandparents were forcibly relocated to Chicago under federal relocation programs. That experience of estrangement — of being Anishinaabe but not of the land — runs through everything he writes. He earned his MFA at Cornell and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and his short fiction appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and the Massachusetts Review before his debut novel arrived in 2025.
Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, 2025) is that debut: a tightly wound political novel set at the fictional Passage Rouge Nation in northern Wisconsin, where a tribal president’s reelection campaign begins to crack when a mentor dies and a nationally known activist arrives to challenge the old order. Hickey’s narrator, Mitch Caddo, has to reckon with blood quantum laws, disenrollment threats, and the machinery of tribal governance — not as abstractions but as the terms on which people he loves belong or do not. The novel was named a most anticipated book of 2025 by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and LitHub.
Hickey’s writing stays focused on people rather than symbols. Reviewers praised his restraint in handling political allegory — the novel has clear resonances with contemporary corruption and Indigenous dispossession, but it does not announce them. It is a book about what sovereignty costs in practice, told by someone who has watched reservation politics up close.