The Hunt for Red October
Tom Clancy, 1984
Mystery, thriller & crime Contemporary fiction
A Cold War thriller built from sonar, bureaucracy and nerve: a Soviet submarine commander takes his newest boat to sea, and no one knows what he intends.
Feels like serenity and dread. About nature.
A page from the book
What a ship’s filth says about the country that built it.
The water in the fjord was choppy, driven by the brisk wind. It began to lap over the October’s spherical bow, rolling back down the flat missile deck which lay before the towering black sail. The water was coated with the bilge oil of numberless ships, filth that would not evaporate in the low temperatures and that left a black ring on the rocky walls of the fjord as though from the bath of a slovenly giant. An altogether apt simile, Ramius thought. The Soviet giant cared little for the dirt it left on the face of the earth, he grumbled to himself. He had learned his seamanship as a boy on inshore fishing boats, and knew what it was to be in harmony with nature. Tom Clancy.Clancy was an insurance broker with no military service when he wrote it; the U.S. Naval Institute Press, which had never published a novel, bought it and launched his career.
Books that feel like this
More by Tom Clancy
Red Storm Rising
Tom Clancy, 1986
A Soviet refinery burns, and the world slides toward a war nobody planned—told through the engineers, analysts and soldiers who see it coming.
The Bear and the Dragon
Tom Clancy, 1991
A look inside the high-stakes world of post-Soviet intelligence, where political legacy crashes headlong into brutal, modern violence.
The Cardinal of the Kremlin
Tom Clancy, 1988
Two intelligence services hunt the same mole, while a secret laser site in the mountains may decide which empire blinks first.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Hunt for Red October like?
- Feels like serenity and dread. About nature.
- What should I read after The Hunt for Red October?
- If you liked The Hunt for Red October, try Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer), The Cuckoo's Calling (Robert Galbraith) and ’Salem’s Lot (Stephen King).
A taste of the feed
What it means when a ruined place starts to look beautiful.
The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Annihilation · Jeff Vandermeer
The quiet craft of helping someone destroy themselves.
How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
The Cuckoo's Calling · Robert Galbraith
The monster under the bed has no therapist; adulthood is the only cure.
There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.
’Salem’s Lot · Stephen King
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