The Hating Game

Sally Thorne understands, almost immediately, that office romance lives or dies on rhythm, and her rhythm is sharp. Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are built as opposites with a cartoonist’s confidence—her brightness against his severity, her verbal play against his deadpan restraint—yet Thorne gives their sparring enough specificity that it rarely feels like generic enemies-to-lovers machinery. The novel’s setting, a merger-era publishing house, is not just decorative; it gives the story a mildly predatory corporate atmosphere in which ambition and intimacy keep brushing against each other. Thorne is especially good at small humiliations, delayed glances, and the way a room can become charged by a single person’s attention.

What makes the book easy to surrender to is its formal discipline. The chapters are brisk, the stakes are legible, and the central conceit—two assistants competing for a promotion while privately fixated on each other—provides a tight frame that the novel rarely strains against. Thorne writes sensuality as a matter of anticipation rather than declaration; the book’s heat comes from misread signals, from Lucy’s self-protective narration, from the strange pleasure of watching two people perform contempt while signaling desire in nearly every other available register. It is a romance novel that understands the glamour of delay, and it uses that delay very well.

Lucy is the book’s best invention because she is not merely “nice”; she is vain, wounded, observant, and professionally humiliated by the environment she inhabits. Thorne lets her vanity be funny rather than punitive, which keeps the voice buoyant when the plot threatens to harden into formula. Joshua, for his part, benefits from being less explained than felt; he works as a cipher of controlled intensity, and the novel smartly refuses to over-psychologize him too early. Their scenes together have the snap of matched resistance, and when the book is at its best, it feels less like reading a romance than watching two people invent a private language out of insults, silences, and perfectly timed concessions.

My reservation is that the novel occasionally mistakes escalated intensity for emotional depth. Because the premise is so effective, Thorne can coast on it longer than she should, and the middle section becomes somewhat repetitive in its choreography of glances, misunderstandings, and baited encounters. Lucy’s inability to register what is plainly in front of her is, at first, part of the joke; eventually, it begins to feel like the machinery protecting the plot. I also wanted more consequence from the workplace itself, which is vivid as a backdrop but not quite interrogated as a system. The book has a slick surface; what it lacks, at times, is the sense of pressure beneath it.

Even so, The Hating Game deserves its reputation because it knows exactly what it is doing with genre—and because it does that thing better than most. Thorne’s prose is clean, lightly wicked, and often genuinely funny; she has the comic instinct to make an eyebrow or a gesture do the work of a paragraph. The ending arrives with the satisfaction of a door finally opening after a long, deliberate tease, and while I wished for a little more risk, I never doubted the novel’s command of tone. It is a polished debut, less interested in reinvention than in immaculate delivery, and on its own terms that is enough to make it memorable.