Two Desks, One Vendetta, Zero Chill

Two Desks, One Merger, No Peace

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman work at a publishing company formed when two smaller houses merged, and their desks face each other, permanently, forever, like some kind of corporate punishment. Lucy is warm and chatty and wears bright colors. Josh is stone-faced, immaculate, and apparently incapable of human emotion in front of her specifically. They have spent years perfecting what Lucy calls The Hating Game, a set of increasingly petty office rituals (the Staring Game, the Congratulations Game) that exist because neither of them can just say what’s actually going on.

Then a promotion opens up. Both of them want it. Suddenly they’re stuck in close quarters, forced into a business trip together, and Lucy’s careful hatred starts developing cracks she absolutely did not authorize. I’m not going to spoil how the promotion plot resolves because Thorne actually does something a little more interesting with it than you’d expect from the setup, but I will say the workplace competition is mostly scaffolding. The real plot is watching two people who’ve built entire personalities around despising each other slowly realize they’ve just been in the world’s longest, weirdest foreplay.

Okay, Here’s the Thing About Josh

Look, I need to be honest about why this book works, because it’s not the plot. The plot is thin. It’s the voice. Lucy narrates in first person and she is funny in that specific way where you can tell the author was enjoying herself, cataloguing Josh’s face like she’s cataloguing a crime scene, noticing his forearms with the kind of detail that made me put the book down at one point just to laugh at myself for how invested I’d gotten. There’s a scene where she becomes obsessed with a mole on his neck. A mole. I have never cared this much about a mole in my life and somehow neither had she until that exact moment, and that’s the trick of the whole book: it makes ordinary office objects (a stapler, a parking spot, a mug) feel loaded with meaning because Lucy’s brain won’t stop assigning meaning to everything Josh does.

And when Josh finally, finally cracks, in the elevator scene everybody who’s read this book will know immediately when I say “the elevator scene,” it lands hard because Thorne has spent the entire book coiling the spring. You believe it when he stops being able to hold his face together.

But I have to be the friend who tells you the truth here: the hate part of enemies to lovers doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny. There were stretches, especially early on, where I wasn’t sure Josh’s coldness read as suppressed longing so much as just actual coldness, and a few of Lucy’s assumptions about his cruelty felt more like plot convenience than character truth. I went back and forth on whether I was buying it or just enjoying the ride and letting logic slide. I think it’s mostly the ride. I think that’s fine. Not every book needs its enemies-to-lovers mechanics to survive a deposition.

The pacing sags a little in the middle, once they’re past the initial tension and into the slower reveal of why Josh is the way he is. The family backstory that explains his guardedness is fine but a little tidy, wrapped up faster than the emotional buildup earned. And some readers, fairly, find the power imbalance (they’re direct professional rivals, sort of also coworkers, sort of also each other’s competition for a promotion) uncomfortable once you stop being swept along by the banter and actually think about HR implications. I thought about the HR implications. I kept reading anyway.

You can grab a copy here if you want to see for yourself: The Hating Game on Amazon.

The best enemies to lovers stories aren’t really about hate. They’re about two people who got the vocabulary wrong for what they were actually feeling, for years, on purpose.

About Sally Thorne

Sally Thorne is Australian, was working a corporate job when she wrote this (you can absolutely tell, the office detail is too specific to be invented), and The Hating Game was her debut novel. It became the kind of runaway word-of-mouth hit that gets a movie adaptation and cements an author as a genre name practically overnight. She’s written since, but this is still the book people mean when they say her name, which has to be a strange thing to live with as a writer. Imagine your first swing being the one everyone measures the rest against.

If the Elevator Scene Wrecked You, Read These Next

• The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren: forced proximity with strangers pretending to be a couple, similarly funny, similarly horny in that slow-burn way.
• Beach Read by Emily Henry: swap the office for neighboring beach houses, but the same tension of two people circling something they won’t name.
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang: different structure entirely but the same commitment to a hero whose emotional restraint is the whole engine of the tension.

For your book club

1. Did you believe Lucy and Josh actually hated each other at the start, or did it read as performance from page one?
2. Is the workplace setting essential to the tension, or would this story work anywhere else?
3. Which of the “games” (Staring, Congratulations) did you find the funniest or the most telling about their dynamic?
4. Did Josh’s backstory earn the coldness he’d been showing Lucy for years, or did it feel like a shortcut to sympathy?
5. Would this relationship work outside the pressure cooker of the book’s plot, once the promotion drama and forced proximity are gone?