The Hating Game Audiobook

Two desks shoved nose to nose, and a staring contest neither combatant will admit is happening. Settle in for my take on the Hating Game audiobook. Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman sit locked across from each other, timing each other’s blinks like it’s an Olympic event, mouths flat, eyes doing murder. This is the Staring Game — one of the invented cruelties these two publishing executive assistants inflict on each other all day — and if you have ever wanted a front-row seat to a grudge that is very obviously, very painfully something else entirely, welcome.

Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game is the enemies-to-lovers office romance the whole subgenre keeps trying to out-do. Lucy is small, smiley, and secretly ferocious; Josh is tall, glacial, and colour-codes his shirts to a system she is dead set on cracking. Their two companies merged badly, they share a desk cluster, and they are both gunning for the same promotion. What starts as pranks and passive-aggression tilts, somewhere around an elevator ride, into a heat neither of them planned for. Spoiler-free promise kept — but the turn lands exactly where you are hoping and dreading it will.

Why the audio wins

Katie Schorr narrates, and across 12 hours and 18 minutes she does the one thing this book absolutely needs: she keeps Lucy funny without flattening her into a cartoon. Lucy’s first-person voice is a running interior monologue of scheming, spiraling, and flat denial, and Schorr paces the sarcasm so the jokes actually get room to breathe. Her Joshua is the quiet standout, though — that low, deadpan delivery makes his rare warm lines drop like a trapdoor opening under you. Banter is the entire engine here, and in Schorr’s hands the volley never once stalls.

If you came for the tension, the middle stretch — a work trip, a sick day, a certain freshly painted bedroom — is where the audio earns its keep. I caught myself grinning at absolutely nothing in public more than once.

The good, honestly

Is it over-the-top? A little. The promotion subplot strains if you poke at it, and Josh’s ice-to-devotion swing asks you to simply go with it. But that is the deal you sign for a book this committed to the fantasy, and Thorne is so plainly having a blast that resistance feels pointless. Quick aside: the sick-day sequence is the moment the whole thing clicks into place, so do not tap out early. The strawberries. That is all I will say.

Content notes

Heads-up for a couple of steamy scenes (nothing you would call graphic, but firmly grown-up), some family-grief backstory on Joshua’s side, and workplace-rivalry tension that is played for fun rather than real cruelty. Nothing heavy here — this is a warm, low-stakes comfort listen at its core.

What to cue up next

• The Unhoneymooners — more can’t-stand-you-until-suddenly-I-can, this time with a forced-proximity vacation twist.
• The Spanish Love Deception — if the slow-burn scowling is your drug, this fake-dating wall of tension delivers in bulk.
• The Love Hypothesis — a guarded, grumpy hero, a sharp heroine, and a fake-relationship setup that melts right on schedule.

Bottom line: this is the comfort listen you reach for when you want to feel giddy and sixteen about a crush again, minus the actual being sixteen. Schorr’s narration is the version to own.

Two quick ones before you go: which office-rivals moment got you first — the Staring Game or the elevator? And are you Team Print or Team Audio for this particular war?