The Hunt for Red October

Tom Clancy

Apr 1992 · A Jack Ryan Novel Book 1 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Don't Miss the Original Series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Starring John Krasinski!

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—nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
 
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.

Ratings and reviews

It's a very good book. It has the normal tom Clancy attention to the military and their systems. It's fascinating and fun. However, the pacing is strange, the characters are not as well developed and it can drag at points. Honesty, and I say this is rare, the movie is better. The characters are fuller, and the action paces better. The focus is much more on the main characters.

I enjoyed the story and the setting. Tom Clancy does a good job of describing the characters and the setting (e.g., a submarine). My main complaint is that towards the end of the book the story seemed to drag on and the technical descriptions of planes and ships were a little tedious.

I've seen the movie so many times, but that didn't end up spoiling the book or the ending! Was a long read, but I enjoyed the whole thing; like usual Clancy writes a very detailed and thorough story.

About the author

A little more than thirty years ago Tom Clancy was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore’s Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October—the first of the phenomenally successful Jack Ryan novels—sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it “the perfect yarn.” From that day forward, Clancy established himself as an undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He passed away in October 2013.