The Hating Game

Sally Thorne's The Hating Game, published in 2016, is set in a publishing house created by a merger. Lucy and Josh share an office and a job title, both working as assistant managers for the joint chief executives of the two companies that have been combined. They are opposites in almost every respect, and they have despised each other since the day they met: Lucy moves the objects on neat-freak Josh's desk out of alignment, and Josh mocks her as a people pleaser who lets her subordinates miss deadlines. Lucy has a master's degree in literature, while Josh has an MBA from Harvard and a record of cutting the workforce by a third.

Their colleagues treat the two of them as a running joke. The rivalry sharpens when a single promotion becomes available and only one of them can have it, and since neither wants to end up working for the other they make a bet about which of them will leave the company first. When work forces them into a shared project, the rules of the original battle stop being useful, and both of them have to work out what the last few years have actually been about.

The novel was adapted into a 2021 romantic comedy film directed by Peter Hutchings and starring Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell, released in cinemas and on video on demand on 10 December 2021 by Vertical Entertainment.