The Hunt for Red October

Written by Tom Clancy

Narrated by Scott Brick

Featured title on PBS's The Great American Read in 2018

The #1 New York Times bestseller that launched the phenomenal career of Tom Clancy—a gripping military thriller that introduced the world to his unforgettable hero, Jack Ryan.

Somewhere under the freezing Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision. The Red October is heading west. The Americans want her. The Russians want her back. The chase for the highly advanced nuclear submarine is on—and there's only one man who can find her....

Brilliant CIA analyst Jack Ryan has little interest in fieldwork, but when covert photographs of Red October land on his desk, Ryan soon finds himself in the middle of a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek played by two world powers—a game that could end in all-out war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781978636309

Tom Clancy

Since the phenomenal worldwide success of ‘‘The Hunt for Red October’, his controversial, ground-breaking first novel, Tom Clancy has become one of the world’s fastest-selling thriller writers. Three of his novels have been made into highly successful films: ‘The Hunt for Red October’, ‘Patriot Games’ and ‘Clear and Present Danger’. He is also the author of several non-fiction books on military subjects, and the co-creator of the ‘Op-Centre’ series. He lives in Maryland, USA.

Reviews for The Hunt for Red October

[ecataldi-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't remember watching the movie so the plot was brand new to me. That being said, it was a very technical book. I learned more about submarines and sonar then I ever wanted to know. I would have liked the book better had there been more action, less explaining, but I get that it was there to make the story seem more credible. Some Soviet captains decide they want to defect to America so they take their submarine and head towards the US. What happens next is a deadly game of cat and mouse and poor CIA agent, Jack Ryan gets dragged into the thick of it. An entire fleet of Soviet warships and submarines chase after The Red October and America and England work together to come up with a plan to meet this sub before it gets blown out of the water. It was an alright book, but I have a hunch that I would enjoy the movie even better. I love me some Harrison Ford.

[edwinkort · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Een mooie spionage thriller die af en toe dreigt te verzanden door veel militaire jargon.

Het grootste deel van dit verhaal speelt zich af op de Atlantische Oceaan, ergens tussen Amerika en Noord-Europa.
De Amerikaanser inlichtingendienst is er achter gekomen dat de Red October een van de modernste Russische onderzeeër is uitgevaren en dat de kapitein en zijn officieren mogelijk willen overlopen. De onderzeeër wordt achtervolgt door een groot deel van de Russische vloot. Om te verhinderen dat deze vloot de onderzeeër vernietigd wordt een plan ontwikkeld en krijgt Jack Ryan, een CIA-agent, de opdracht om dit over te brengen aan de commandanten van de USS Kennedy en de HMS Invincible op de hoogte te brengen van het plan.

Het speciale team dat de onderzeeër moet overnemen verongelukt echter, en zo blijft Ryan de enige die het plan kan uitvoeren.

Na veel actie lukt het Ryan om de bemanning van de Red October te krijgen en samen met de achtergebleven officieren en een kleine bemanning van de USS Dallas brengt hij haar naar de voorlopige schuilplaats. Ondertussen blijkt er nog een saboteur aan boord te zijn achter gebleven en wordt de Red October ook nog eens aangevallen door een Russische onderzeeër.

Al met al een goed te lezen boek, die, net als een aantal andere boeken van Clancy, is verfilmd.

[pratalife · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

5 stars for the story of course, but the audio recording (available from NLB) is not the best. After loading on my iPod, there was a definite warble, and I didn't particularly like the narrator's voice characterisations

[5hrdrive · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of three terrific books by Tom Clancy, the others being Red Storm Rising and The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Very dated nowadays of course, but still a page-turner. Been about fifteen years since I last read this, had forgotten how gripping the last sixty or so pages are. Just when you think the story is finished the tension really ratchets up.

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Hunt for Red October was my first Tom Clancy novel, prompted by his recent death. I can't say it will be the first of many and it may indeed be my last (though I own the sequel The Cardinal and the Kremlin in paperback, so I may read that at some point). The basic storyline is probably familiar to many, due to the rather good film starring Harrison Ford as the Soviet submarine commander who pulls a trick on his superiors and defects to the USA along with his officers and his prize submarine. This storyline is a perfectly reasonable and dramatic basis for a novel set in the Cold War and there are some tense and dramatic episodes. However, it is over long for this premise and there is just, for me, too much technical jargon about the workings of submarines of various types and of different kinds of weapons and sonar systems. The characters also mostly come across as rather flat and stereotypical - though there is some back story given for the main American character, Jack Ryan, a recurring character in Clancy's novels, he still does not really convince me as a naval historian turned CIA agent. The Soviet Captain Ramius is somewhat more developed, though I found it hard to feel sympathy for him given his wanton personal murder of a fellow officer in chapter 1 in order to lay the grounds for his secret mission to defect. So not a winner for me all round.

[ed0jones · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read this while in the US Navy back in the mid 80s I still remember this as a great book that really captured military life. It was a page turner marathon read. But later Clancy books left me cold. The main character Jack Rayan(?) became a superman. Found better writers, but this first book was great.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I know I really should not have liked this book. The writing is pedestrian, not much characterization, a fanciful plot, but damn, it's a page-turner and great story.

[aresofambition · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Captain Marko Ramius, the most brilliant commander of the Soviet Navy has made a fateful decision: he orders the Red October, the largest and most powerful submarine in the world with the power to wipe out hundreds of cities at once before silently submerging beneath the water without a trace, on a course towards the United States. Soviets insist that Ramius is mentally insane and attempts to fire his nuclear warheads on the United States, but maverick CIA agent Jack Ryan is convinced that Ramius is attempting to defect.This book is excellent at capturing the threat of nuclear armageddon that cast a dark shadow on Americans and Soviets alike throughout the latter half of the 20th century. I recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in the Cold War. The in-depth analysis of of the US Navy, CIA, and submarine technology of the US and Soviet fleets might bore some readers, but you will be hardpressed to find any novel that captures these more realistically. The Pentagon itself has commended Tom Clancy for his accurate depiction of the US Navy, and has agreed to help research every novel Clancy has written since.Captain Marko Ramius is arguably the novel's main character as well as it's most interesting character. He is the person who is at the center of every plot twist the novel takes, and it is his actions that dictate the pace of the story. Captain Bart Mancuso, the no-nonsense yet likeable commanding officer of the USS Dallas, a US attack submarine, makes for a worthy foe for Ramius in the novel, as Jack Ryan, the lone CIA agent convinced of his idea, acts as the go-between the reader and the other characters. Despite him being surrounded constantly by the upper echelons of the US Government, he is never seems to fit in, which makes him more relatable in the eye of the reader.The action is unique, and Clancy succeeds in creating great tension in an ultimate clash of submarines at the climax of the novel, a feat that is very difficult to accomplish.

[doondeck · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Still the best Clancy book

[lindseyrivers · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Clancy is so hard to read sometimes. The first few chapters took me forever to finish because they were so technical and quite frankly boring. I never built much of a relationship with the characters, and was overall unimpresed. I think I would like to see the movie to see the tension that could have been there in this book but just wasn't.

[tadad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Though this is number four chronologically in the series, it was the first published and probably the best to start with as it takes the time to introduce the characters in the other books.I really enjoyed this book and the next few. However, though I was religiously picking up each book as it came out and reading it, I eventually realized that this was just habit and that I wasn't really enjoying the books. They became too formulaic: Jack Ryan encounters new international crisis, Jack Ryan defeats new international crisis without breaking a sweat, Jack Ryan moves one more notch up the ladder toward Supreme Grand Poobah of America.I think stopping around Clear and Present Danger is the best.

[benfulton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first of the great thriller novels that make an attempt to have highly authentic descriptions of the relevant technology. I always have a feeling when I pick up a Clancy that at some point he went to someone in the military and said, "What's your nightmare scenario?" and then picked and poked out all the little details to figure out exactly how the scenario might play itself out, which is how you get nuclear explosions at the Super Bowl or planes flying into the White House. Maybe the question that was the genesis of this book was more like, "What's your dream scenario?", because if you asked this of a sub commander, wouldn't it be to get your hands on the latest Soviet technology for a really good going over? Not to mention the skipper of the ship itself.But again, the real draw is the descriptions of the technology. The way the sonar man first finds the sub; operations on board fighter jets and destroyers; all of it rings with such authenticity that you feel you're really there and that these guys are really pros.What you lose for this, of course, is that the characters are way underdrawn. Offhand I can think of exactly one highly-placed member of the military in a Clancy who was a jerk - surely there are more in real life - and the rest all appear to be more or less supermen. But that's ok, there are other books to read if you want Insight Into The Human Condition. Read this one for the action and suspense, because it's a page turner. Don't be surprised if you stay up way later than you planned to finish it. I did.

[jpsnow · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps it's because I already knew the (rather different) story, but this wasn't as gripping as some of his later works. The writing was less formulaic and it does introduce the characters for further development in Jack Ryan's world.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my first Clancy novel. I found it a bit of a slow starter, but I've been told that Clancy books tend to be that way. The first 50 pages or so were very dense with people and information, but after that, you know everything you need to follow the plot the rest of the way through. Suspenseful, I would definitely read others.

[mendoza_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As someone who grew up during the cold war I appreciate the suspense and dread of the possibilities of this novel - at the time it was written.Clancy singlhandedly made me grow to enjoy the whole military government espionage genre. The Hunt For Red October is one of my favourite.Somewhere under the Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision: the Red October is heading west. The Americans want her. The Russians want her back. And the most incredible chase in history is on....THis is a non stop adventure ride filled with suspense. As enjoyable read now as much as it was over 20 years ago.

[ccookie_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First lines:~Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarny~I don't know how realistic this book is but it certainly seems to be a realistic depiction of what life might be on a nuclear submarine. The tension of the chase, the espionage, the creativity of how to deal with 'keeping a Russian submarine' that a defector has brought to the American shore was really, really amazing.Having said all that, I think that I liked the movie better than the book. And it takes a lot for me to say that I liked a movie better. I almost always like the book best. I have not read anything else by Tom Clancy but perhaps I will pick up another. He really seems to know what he is doing!

[santhony_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is Clancy's first novel (to my knowledge). As such, it ushers in an almost original genre, the military technothriller. This novel will have you awake well into the early morning hours, engrossed in the story. Clancy follows this effort up with 5-6 equally outstanding efforts before essentially running out of things to say.

[tjsjohanna_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In spite of all the technological information buried in among the action, the story clips right along. Mr. Clancy approaches the story from a multitude of viewpoints - taking the reader from the Russian submarine to the CIA to various battleships to the Kremlin. Many of the scenes are short, making for a feeling of quick reading. One point of interest, reading in 2010, is how outdated the technology is. In addition, the world has changed politically so that a younger generation would find this novel to be more of historical interest in terms of what the Cold War used to be. Still, an enjoyable read.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Clancy you're not going to get an elegant prose style or characters with any depth. I know that. But I give the book top marks for what it is--a well-paced, gripping nautical adventure tale with a wealth of technical detail that makes you feel like you have a privileged glimpse into the workings of the military and intelligence communities. This is my favorite Clancy book, in my opinion the best of the first half-dozen or so novels he published before I gave up on him. The Hunt for Red October is hardly short, but I found it gripping and was never bored--I found a lot of Clancy's later books bloated, and to me Jack Ryan became an unbearable Marty Stu. There are hints of what's to come even in this first book. Ryan, a CIA analyst, is depicted as independently wealthy from a brief time working in the stock market, and he's been knighted by the British for saving two people from terrorists. (In the later Patriot Games we learn the couple was the Prince and Princess of Wales!) In this book though, Ryan's still something close to human and relatable. And in any case, the character who is the real hero of this book is Soviet submariner Marko Ramus, captain of Red October, who is defecting to the West and taking his nuclear missile sub with him. As a fan of tales of ships from Star Trek to Horatio Hornblower, I found this novel an irresistible read that entertained me from beginning to end.

[brendanpmyers · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was March, 1984 when I read a blurb in Time Magazine about a book that was all the buzz in Washington, D.C. Written by a sometime insurance salesman, it was a Cold War thriller about submarine cat and mouse in the Atlantic between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

What the "buzz" was about was the possibility that the young bureaucrat who had written the book had somehow gotten hold of classified information. Some felt the book was so detailed in its description of cutting-edge submarine technology, he had to have had inside information.

So I went down to the bookstore and bought what must have been a second or third edition hardback of the book, and remember being truly impressed by the sheer quality of the book itself. From the dustjacket to the stitching to the sheer . . . tightness of the book, it was clear Naval Institute Press put out a fine product.

The now familiar plot goes that the Soviet Union launches a new submarine named the Red October that ostensibly, because of new cavitation technology, is inaudible to Americans, thus making it a potential game-changing "first strike" weapon. A young naval commander named Jack Ryan has a theory that the commander of the new sub might very well be planning to defect to the United States, taking his sub with him.

In terms of the book, yes, the plot intrigued me, and yes, I liked the Jack Ryan character. But what had so impressed all those folks in D.C., all those details about submarine technology, those I found a little . . . boring. Just thought it was too much, is all.

When he put out his next book, Red Storm Rising, I immediately went out and bought it in hardback, brought it on a plane, tried to get into it, and just could not suspend my disbelief that there could be ANY scenario in which the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would ever fight a conventional, non-nuclear war. I put it down not even half-read, and never read another Clancy. Enjoyed the hell out of the movies, though.

At any rate, I hadn't at all intended to leave my thoughts on this book, or on Clancy, however hearing the news today that Tom Clancy had passed, I thought I'd jot a few things down.

And of course, it turned out Tom Clancy had no special access to classified information while writing The Hunt for Red October. He simply did his homework.

RIP, Mr. Clancy. You certainly did something right.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's been years since I've read this, but I remember it as compelling, interesting and impossible to put down.

[ko40370 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I tired of the fact that every single character in the book, no matter how minor a player, was a genius in his field or at the top of his class, etc. And I don't believe there was a single female character, except Jack Ryan's wife was mentioned, but she was never heard from, that I recall. Not a very balanced novel. The hunt that comprised the last 20% of the book was very skillfully done, and very exciting, however.

[crashmyparty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. Tom Clancy is brilliant.

[mike_buckley_45 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A classic.

[durgaprsd04-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A gripping thriller

[csweder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What can I say, I am a Jack Ryan fan.

This was a great book, but the movie was (as usual) terrible in comparison. Clancy's books are wayyyy too long to turn into movies, I think.

[rolyaty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read this book in my Sophomore year in High School and it propelled me into a world of adult fiction, starting with the rest of the Clancy novels. Loved this book.

[fordj_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the "must read" Tom Clancy books. Again, the movie was good but the book is great. Couldn't put it down.

[brettjames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the fountainhead of the modern military thriller. If Clancy hadn't written this, we'd still be reading Alistair MacLean and Jack Higgins (not that that would be so terrible.)

[kellswitch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is not normally the kind of book I read as I hate political thrillers and conspiracy stories in general, but I really enjoyed this one from beginning to end. It's the only Clancy novel I own.I found the situation believable as written, the characters believable and engaging and I found myself very caught up in what happened to them and caring about the outcome.I found the technical language and naval slang used in the book very easy to follow as written and felt it added to the story without excluding someone like me who normally has no idea about things like this.