The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

The novel begins after the merger of two very different publishing houses. Lucy Hutton worked for Gamin Publishing, associated with literary taste and a more informal culture; Joshua Templeman came from Bexley Books, whose identity is more commercially and administratively driven. Their employers now jointly run Bexley & Gamin, and Lucy and Joshua sit opposite each other as assistants to the co-chief executives. The arrangement turns unresolved corporate friction into a personal contest conducted at extremely close range.

Lucy narrates the conflict as a series of games. She and Joshua stare, mirror one another, record possible human-resources violations, and search constantly for signs of weakness. These routines are funny, but they also reveal how completely each has learned the other’s habits. Their supposed indifference requires extraordinary attention. Lucy treats Joshua’s severity as proof of contempt, while Joshua’s reserve prevents her from easily testing that interpretation. Because the reader receives events through Lucy, the romance depends on recognizing how confidently she can misread what she sees.

A newly created management position raises the stakes. Lucy wants the promotion not only as professional advancement but as evidence that kindness, creativity, and accommodation do not make her weak. Joshua appears to represent the opposite theory of workplace success: discipline, intimidation, and emotional control. Their competition therefore becomes a clash between different ideas of authority as well as a battle between two ambitious individuals. Both also recognize that reporting to the winner would be intolerable, making the contest a potential turning point in their careers.

Physical attraction complicates the rivalry, but the deeper transformation comes through situations that expose life beyond the office. Illness, social encounters, family relationships, and moments of unguarded care challenge Lucy’s simplified image of Joshua. She gradually discovers that his intimidating manner coexists with insecurity, loyalty, and a long history of being measured against expectations he cannot comfortably satisfy. Joshua, meanwhile, sees that Lucy’s friendliness is not the absence of ambition. Her desire to please others can conceal both determination and fear of being underestimated.

The central “hating game” is thus a structure both characters use to avoid direct emotional risk. Competition lets them remain closely engaged without admitting how much the other matters. Their banter gives attraction a safe disguise, while the promotion supplies a plausible explanation for obsessive attention. The novel’s romantic question is less whether antagonism will become love—the genre makes that trajectory visible—than whether Lucy and Joshua can abandon interpretations that protect them from rejection. By linking professional rivalry with emotional self-defense, Thorne turns the office into a stage on which ambition, desire, pride, and vulnerability become difficult to separate.

**Perception and misinterpretation:** Lucy’s account is vivid but partial. The story repeatedly asks how much apparent hostility is real and how much is an interpretation shaped by fear, pride, and incomplete information.

**Competition as intimacy:** Lucy and Joshua’s games are adversarial, yet they require sustained attention to each other. Rivalry becomes a coded relationship long before either character can speak honestly about attachment.

**Ambition and likability:** Lucy worries that being agreeable has caused others to underestimate her. Her pursuit of promotion tests whether she can assert authority without abandoning the warmth she values in herself.

**Emotional control and vulnerability:** Joshua’s restraint initially looks like confidence and superiority. As the novel reveals more of him, composure emerges partly as protection against judgment and rejection.

**Opposites and hidden similarities:** Their clothes, manners, and working styles appear sharply opposed, but both are observant, competitive, lonely, and deeply affected by how others evaluate them.

**Workplace identity:** The merger places both characters inside an organization that is still deciding what it values. Their personal contest reflects a larger struggle between corporate cultures and definitions of success.

The Hating Game appeared in 2016 during a period when contemporary romance was increasingly foregrounding professional women, workplace settings, rapid dialogue, and romantic-comedy structures familiar from film and television. Its central pattern—two apparent enemies discovering attraction—belongs to a much older comic tradition, but the novel relocates that pattern to the modern open office and makes career advancement integral to the courtship.

The publishing merger is especially significant. Consolidation and competing commercial and literary priorities provide more than background decoration: they explain why Lucy and Joshua inherit rival loyalties and why a promotion can symbolize the future culture of their company. At the same time, the book reflects continuing debates around whether women can be ambitious, authoritative, and well liked without being forced to choose among those qualities.

The novel predates the widespread normalization of remote work, so its comedy depends on enforced daily proximity—shared space, visible routines, and the inability to escape a colleague’s attention. That office-centered environment is essential to both its tension and its particular snapshot of professional life.

This book is best suited to adult readers who enjoy contemporary romance, enemies-to-lovers plots, workplace competition, first-person narration, and extensive verbal sparring. Readers who prefer character chemistry and close observation over a large cast or complex external plot are especially likely to appreciate it. It may also appeal to readers drawn to romantic comedies in which familiar outcomes matter less than the timing, misunderstandings, and emotional disclosures along the way.

It will be less suitable for readers uncomfortable with sexual content, strong language, or romance between coworkers competing for the same position. Those who dislike relationships built around teasing, antagonism, jealousy, or uneven communication may find the central dynamic frustrating rather than playful. The Library of Congress’s accessible-format description notes strong language and explicit sexual material.

The prose is accessible and conversational, with little specialized knowledge required. Lucy’s first-person voice moves quickly between dialogue, comic exaggeration, physical observation, private anxiety, and romantic fantasy. Chapters generally sustain a brisk pace, although the narrative’s intense focus on two people means that small gestures and repeated office encounters carry more weight than major changes of setting.

The main interpretive challenge is the gap between Lucy’s conclusions and the evidence available to the reader. Understanding the novel involves noticing when her descriptions reveal possibilities she has not accepted. Readers should also expect an emotionally heightened style in which attraction, embarrassment, anger, and insecurity are rendered with deliberate intensity.

No advance preparation is necessary. A basic familiarity with office hierarchy may help: Lucy and Joshua serve different co-chief executives and compete for a management role that would place one above the other. It is also useful to recognize the conventions of enemies-to-lovers romance, where antagonism creates narrative tension but is gradually reinterpreted through new information.

Readers unfamiliar with publishing need not study the industry. The contrast between Bexley’s commercially minded culture and Gamin’s literary self-image matters mainly because it reinforces the characters’ inherited loyalties and opposing work styles. Awareness that the narration remains limited to Lucy’s viewpoint will be more important than technical knowledge of the business.

Choose The Hating Game for a tightly focused romantic comedy that extracts substantial tension from a simple arrangement: two highly observant rivals facing each other across an office every day. The recurring games give the relationship a recognizable rhythm, while the promotion prevents the romance from floating free of practical consequences.

The novel is particularly effective at making interpretation part of the entertainment. Readers can compare Lucy’s certainty about Joshua with the details she reports, often detecting emotional implications before she does. It also gives professional ambition real importance. Lucy’s career goal is not merely an obstacle delaying romance; it is connected to her struggle to distinguish kindness from passivity and approval from respect.

A careful reader may leave the novel more attentive to the stories people construct from another person’s manner, especially when reserve is mistaken for dislike or friendliness for weakness. The book suggests that prolonged conflict can sometimes conceal familiarity, fascination, or fear, though it does not present antagonism as a universally reliable sign of affection.

Lucy’s career arc encourages reflection on the cost of making likability a central measure of self-worth. Joshua’s development, in turn, shows how competence and control can conceal insecurity. Together, their story emphasizes the need to replace performance, guessing, and strategic provocation with direct communication. It also illustrates how a romance can alter self-understanding: each character becomes a mirror in which the other must confront traits that office rivalry had made easier to caricature.

The novel’s strongest element is its concentrated chemistry. A limited setting and small cast allow dialogue, routines, and minor changes in behavior to accumulate meaning. Lucy’s energetic narrative voice gives the comedy a distinct personality, while Joshua’s reserve creates interpretive space and suspense.

The repeated games provide both structure and characterization. They show the pair’s competitiveness, but also how carefully they monitor one another. The workplace stakes are clear and easy to follow, and the contrast between the merged companies supports the central opposition without requiring lengthy exposition.

The book also understands that a predictable romantic destination need not produce a dull journey. It generates interest through shifting perceptions, emotional reversals, and the gradual disclosure of vulnerability rather than through uncertainty about the genre’s ultimate promise.

The narration is so closely confined to Lucy that Joshua’s motives remain filtered through her attraction and assumptions. Readers seeking equally developed dual perspectives may find that imbalance limiting. The secondary characters and wider publishing world are lightly drawn because the novel devotes most of its attention to the central couple.

Some readers may also question the professional boundaries surrounding a romance between direct competitors or find aspects of the pair’s games immature. The heightened attention to physical appearance, body size, clothing, and conventional markers of attractiveness may feel narrow or dated to some audiences.

The resolution is intentionally neat in the manner of romantic comedy. Contemporary trade criticism was divided on whether that neatness was fully earned: Publishers Weekly praised the chemistry but considered the ending somewhat too tidy. Readers looking for a detailed examination of organizational ethics or realistic promotion procedures should approach the office setting as a romantic-comedy framework rather than a workplace case study.

**Lucy Hutton:** The narrator and an executive assistant aligned with the former Gamin Publishing culture. Her bright personal style and desire to be liked contrast with her considerable competitiveness. Her central challenge is to claim ambition without believing she must become emotionally cold.

**Joshua Templeman:** Lucy’s officemate, rival, and fellow candidate for promotion. His formal appearance, efficiency, and guarded behavior make him difficult for Lucy to interpret. Understanding the difference between his public control and private vulnerability is crucial to the romance.

**Bexley & Gamin:** The merged publishing company where the story takes place. It represents an uneasy union of contrasting business cultures and supplies the institutional pressure behind Lucy and Joshua’s conflict.

**The promotion:** More than a plot device, the management vacancy tests both characters’ ideas about leadership, status, and self-respect. Because the loser may have to work for the winner, it makes emotional trust professionally risky.

**The office games:** The Staring Game, Mirror Game, and other recurring contests turn routine interaction into ritual. They function as warfare, flirtation, surveillance, and a substitute for honest conversation.

**Enemies-to-lovers:** The romance convention organizing the novel. Here, the pattern depends on limited perspective: apparent hatred is gradually reconsidered as Lucy gains access to contexts and motives she previously lacked.

When does rivalry become a form of attachment?

How accurately can we understand another person when pride encourages the least generous interpretation?

Can someone remain kind and approachable while also pursuing authority and recognition?

What is the difference between being liked, being respected, and being truly known?

How do workplace roles and inherited corporate loyalties shape personal judgment?

Why might people choose teasing, competition, or control instead of direct emotional disclosure?

Can attraction be separated from the thrill of conflict, and how can the characters determine whether their connection will survive once the contest changes?

Begin by mapping the different meanings of the word “game.” Consider which contests are playful, which are defensive, and which have genuine professional consequences. Groups may want to track moments when Lucy’s narration provides evidence that conflicts with her stated interpretation of Joshua.

Compare the former Bexley and Gamin cultures. Discuss whether Lucy and Joshua truly embody those institutions or merely use them to explain a more personal incompatibility. The promotion offers another useful angle: ask what each candidate appears to believe leadership requires and whether either person’s behavior supports that belief.

Pay attention to changes in setting. Scenes outside the shared office allow information and behavior that the workplace suppresses. Discuss why illness, family contact, and social situations alter the balance between the characters.

Finally, separate genre pleasure from real-world judgment. A productive conversation can appreciate the banter while still examining professional boundaries, indirect communication, jealousy, and the risks of treating hostility as evidence of attraction.

1. Which of Lucy’s early assumptions about Joshua seems most reasonable, and which rests on the weakest evidence?
2. What do the office games allow Lucy and Joshua to express without saying directly?
3. How does the Bexley–Gamin merger influence the way each character views the other?
4. Does Lucy’s desire to be liked help her professionally, limit her, or do both at different moments?
5. What qualities would make Lucy or Joshua the stronger manager?
6. When does their rivalry begin to feel emotionally intimate rather than merely hostile?
7. How does Lucy’s first-person narration shape the reader’s judgment of Joshua?
8. Which revelations genuinely revise earlier events, and which simply confirm what the reader may already suspect?
9. How effectively does the novel balance romantic fantasy with the ethical complications of a workplace relationship?
10. Does the ending resolve the career and relationship conflicts equally well? Why or why not?
11. What would change most if the story included Joshua’s viewpoint?
12. Where should readers draw the line between entertaining enemies-to-lovers behavior and unhealthy communication?

Bibliographic identity was checked against the author’s official title page, a WorldCat bibliographic record, Google Books edition records, and contemporary trade-review metadata. These sources consistently identify Sally Thorne as the author and William Morrow as the publisher of the selected 2016 U.S. edition. The content description was cross-checked against the Library of Congress’s National Library Service catalog entry. Critical context was informed by reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. Because several later editions and international editions exist, the ISBN and publication date listed here apply specifically to the verified U.S. paperback edition.