The Big Chihuahua

For readers of Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Nathan Hill, this is a literary novel with bite, heart, and a voice all its own.

When Emma Shapiro arrives home from college armed with a biting intellect and a playlist of protest songs, she expects a summer of healing with her enigmatic father. What she finds instead is a swirl of buried secrets, aging revolutionaries, Silicon Valley delusions, and a nation teetering on the edge of reinvention—or collapse.

Told through a kaleidoscope of voices—activists and CEOs, teenagers and truthers, ghosts of the past and echoes of the future—The Big Chihuahua is a razor-sharp, tender-hearted satire of American dysfunction. At its core is Emma: a daughter searching for connection, meaning, and a way forward in a fractured world.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Daniel Ben-Horin’s genre-defying novel explores the legacy of the counterculture, the inheritance of ideals, and the urgent question of how—and whether—we might still change the world.