Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Big Chief | 2025 | Jon Hickey | Buy |
Big Chief (2025) arrived with significant pre-publication attention — the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and LitHub all named it a most anticipated book of the year — and the novel delivers on that attention. Jon Hickey builds his story around Mitch Caddo, the youngest-ever tribal operations director at the Passage Rouge Nation, whose world falls apart when a political mentor dies and an election he thought he understood becomes suddenly unpredictable.
The novel moves fast but thinks slowly. Hickey packs blood quantum law, disenrollment politics, and corporate tribal economy into a story that never feels like a civics lesson because every policy question has a human face. Mitch’s conflict with the activist Gloria Hawkins, and his complicated history with Layla Beck — the tribal president’s estranged sister — keep the personal and the political entangled throughout. The result is the kind of debut that suggests a writer who has been thinking about a subject for years and is ready to make it into fiction.