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Freight

A Novel

Coming Soon

Contributors

By Ryan Lowell

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Aug 11, 2026
Page Count
224 pages
ISBN-13
9780316596534

Price

$14.99

Price

$19.99 CAD

As a lone semi-truck makes its snowy way to the US-Canadian border, a series of vivid characters are inexorably drawn into a desperate, comedic, and murderous scheme to steal its precious cargo. 

Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn’t exist.

Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $5 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals.

Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy's way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake.

In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love–a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.

  • “A brutal, clever, and devastating debut. Freight understands the psychology of work like few novels in recent years, laying bare how a job can hollow you out, define you, then trap you, all while turning the Can-Am highway into a moral pressure cooker running hot at all hours. After Freight, I’m ready to ride with Ryan Lowell wherever the road takes him, mile after unforgiving mile.”
    Eryk Pruitt, author of Something Bad Wrong and Blood Red Summer
  • Freight is the best road read I’ve read in years. Ryan Lowell writes beautiful, unconstrained dialogue that never loses its authenticity. . .. Fueled by diesel, grist, and greed, Freight is a spectacular debut foot to metal sounding its horn in the passing lane.”
     
    Lee Durkee, author of The Last Taxi Driver & Stalking Shakespeare

Ryan Lowell

About the Author

Ryan Lowell was born and raised in Bucksport, Maine. His fiction has appeared in Worker’s Write! and Overtime, and his story “Things Fall Apart” was a Glimmer Train short story award finalist. He lives in South Portland with his wife and two sons.
 

Learn more about this author