The Hating Game

The Workplace War

Lucy Hutton and Josh Templeman work across from each other at Bexley & Gamin Publishing, a merged company where Lucy’s former boss and Josh’s former boss are now co-CEOs. They have separate loyalties, opposing personalities, and a mutual antagonism so thoroughgoing that they’ve turned it into a game with elaborate rules.

Lucy is sunshine and effort and color-coded pens. Josh is blue eyes and silence and a face that most people find unapproachable. They play Mirror, they play Elevator Button, they play HR Complaint. Every interaction is a chess move.

Sally Thorne’s genius is in the precision of this setup. The tension is not vague or manufactured — it has specific games, specific rules, specific stakes. When it begins to crack, it cracks in specific, earned ways.

The Slow Burn Mechanics

What makes The Hating Game enduringly popular is Thorne’s patience. The book runs almost 400 pages, and she does not rush the transformation of hate into love. Instead she builds it through accumulation: the moments when the mask slips, the moments when each character does something for the other that their war shouldn’t allow, the moments when the reader sees what Lucy and Josh can’t yet see about themselves.

Josh Templeman occupies a particular place in the romance reader’s pantheon. He is genuinely difficult — cold in public, economical with words, seemingly untouchable. The revelation that this exterior conceals something quite different is done in stages, each one recalibrating the reader’s understanding of everything that came before.

Lucy’s Voice

One of the underrated pleasures of the book is Lucy’s first-person narration. She is funny and self-aware and slightly unreliable in the way that people are unreliable when they’re in denial about what they feel. Her running commentary on Josh — why he’s infuriating, why she keeps noticing things about him, why she absolutely does not care what he thinks about her outfit — is a masterclass in romantic dramatic irony.

A Template for the Genre

The Hating Game influenced a generation of workplace romance novels that followed. Its specific combination of slow burn, enemies-to-lovers, and a hero who is actually worth the wait established expectations for the subgenre that most subsequent entries have had to contend with.

The Enemies-to-Lovers Engine

The Hating Game is a near-textbook execution of enemies-to-lovers, romance’s most psychologically demanding trope, and its success illuminates why the trope works when it works. The animosity between Lucy and Josh must feel genuine rather than a thin misunderstanding, and Thorne grounds it in real opposition — different temperaments, different loyalties within a merged company, a workplace rivalry with actual professional stakes in the promotion they are both chasing. At the same time, the antagonism must be charged with the unmistakable current that distinguishes hatred from indifference, and Thorne calibrates this perfectly: every barb between Lucy and Josh crackles with an attention neither will admit. The genius of the trope, fully realized here, is that the same intensity that fuels the fighting becomes the fuel for the falling, so that the transformation from enemies to lovers feels not like a reversal but like a revelation of what the hostility was masking all along.

Josh Templeman, Decoded

The novel’s most discussed achievement is its hero, and Josh Templeman has become a reference point in contemporary romance for good reason. Thorne constructs him as a closed door the reader spends the whole book learning to open: cold and economical in public, seemingly contemptuous, his few words and rigid routines giving nothing away. The pleasure of the book is the staged revelation that this forbidding exterior conceals a man of deep, careful, long-standing devotion — that the things Lucy reads as hostility are in fact the awkward expressions of a person who feels far more than he can show. The famous reveal of how long and how completely Josh has noticed Lucy recalibrates every earlier scene, rewarding rereading. This architecture — the gruff, guarded hero whose hidden tenderness is disclosed in stages — is enormously satisfying when executed with Thorne’s patience, and it set a template that countless subsequent romances have imitated.

Lucy’s Unreliable Narration

Much of the book’s charm lives in Lucy Hutton’s first-person voice, and Thorne uses it to generate a sustained, delicious dramatic irony. Lucy is funny, self-aware, and meticulous — the color-coded pens, the careful records of her skirmishes with Josh — but she is also, in the way of people deep in denial, an unreliable narrator of her own heart. Her relentless cataloguing of Josh’s infuriating qualities, her insistence that she absolutely does not care what he thinks, and her inability to explain why she keeps noticing the precise blue of his eyes all signal to the reader exactly what she refuses to see in herself. This gap between what Lucy tells us and what she clearly feels is the engine of the comedy, and it makes the reader an active participant, rooting for a recognition the narrator keeps fending off. Thorne’s control of this device is the mark of a writer who understands that the best romantic comedy is built on character, not coincidence.

A Genre Touchstone

Published in 2016, The Hating Game became one of the defining contemporary romances of its generation, a debut that helped revitalize the workplace and enemies-to-lovers subgenres and that remains a near-universal recommendation for readers new to adult romance. Its influence is visible across the wave of slow-burn office romances that followed, most of which have had to define themselves against Thorne’s template. A 2021 film adaptation extended its reach, though the novel’s interiority — so much of its pleasure being Lucy’s running internal commentary — proved difficult to translate to the screen. The book endures because it does the fundamental things superbly: it builds genuine tension, it rewards patience, and it delivers a hero worth the wait. For all the romances that have copied its structure, few have matched its precision, which is why it continues to be cited as the modern benchmark for the form.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The definitive modern workplace romance, built on a slow burn that earns every degree of its temperature.

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