The Hating Game

The desk has a theory about why The Hating Game conquered the world, and it is not the elevator scene — though we will get to the elevator scene. It is that Sally Thorne understood something most workplace romances miss: hatred, done properly, is a form of attention. Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman sit opposite each other in a shared office and catalogue one another with the intensity of scholars. The staring contests, the mirrored outfits, the little wars over nothing — every hostility is also an inventory. By the time the book admits what all that noticing has been for, the reader worked it out chapters ago and is waiting, deliciously, for the characters to catch up.

That waiting is the pleasure, and Thorne manages it like a professional. This is a debut novel that behaves like a tenth book: the banter has genuine snap rather than the scripted ping-pong that plagues the genre's lesser entries, the pacing knows exactly when to let a scene breathe and when to slam a door, and Lucy's narration (anxious, vivid, a little unhinged in the way of all great romance heroines) makes even a paint-colour argument compulsive. We have pressed this book on committed non-romance readers as an experiment. It converts. It has the highest conversion rate of anything on our shelves.

What we admire most, though, is what sits under the comedy. Joshua Templeman could have been a cardboard grump — tall, cold, secretly soft, next. Instead Thorne gives him an interior that unfolds slowly and sideways, through gestures Lucy misreads and the reader, in time, doesn't, and what unfolds is a quiet study in how thoroughly two people can misunderstand each other while paying ferocious attention. There is real tenderness here about ambition, about families that shape you crooked, about how exhausting it is to be the smallest, brightest person in every room. The feelings, when they arrive, have been earned line by line.

Honest notices, fair as ever: this is an office romance in which HR is a rumour, and readers who need workplace realism should adjust expectations at the door — the book is a heightened, glossy machine, openly so. The spice arrives late and warm rather than early and scorching. And yes, the elevator scene deserves its legend; we have reread it more times than we will admit in print.

Who is this for? Anyone new to contemporary romance who wants to understand, in one sitting, why enemies-to-lovers pays the genre's bills. Anyone who has ever had a nemesis they thought about slightly too often. It is the second book on our Start Here list because it is the modern genre's best handshake. Welcoming, wickedly funny, and better crafted than it has any obligation to be. The desk's copy is creased at the spine in one particular place. You will find the place.