Sally Thorne Books in Order

If you want sharp banter and enemies-to-lovers tension: The Hating Game
If you like messy childhood crushes and renovation chaos: 99 Percent Mine
If you want the warmest, softest side of her writing: Second First Impressions → Rosie and the Dreamboat
If you want romance with a spooky, playful twist: Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match

Sally Thorne grew up in Canberra's Weston Creek, and romance found her early. As a kid she borrowed Harlequin novels from her mum and read old horse stories too, which helps explain why her books mix big feelings with a real love of favorite tropes and dreamy escapes.

Before publishing fiction, she worked a regular office job in Canberra. She has said that The Hating Game began as a birthday gift for a friend, and that writing it pulled her out of the office and into a very different life.

The office details mattered.

When The Hating Game arrived in 2016, it clicked fast. Readers fell for Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman, two assistants locked in a workplace rivalry that keeps tipping into flirtation, and the book took off well beyond Australia. It sold widely, landed on bestseller lists, and later became a film released in 2021.

Thorne did not spend the next few years repeating herself. 99 Percent Mine shifts from office warfare to a long-running crush, a brother's best friend, and a cottage renovation full of old history. Second First Impressions goes gentler and stranger, setting a love story inside a retirement villa and pairing guarded Ruthie with drifting, golden-hearted Teddy. The settings change, but the pull is similar, tight quarters, emotional static, and people who cannot ignore each other forever.

She likes a strong setup, but her books are also about what happens when people get tired of hiding inside old roles. Darcy Barrett acts fearless and is not. Ruthie Midona has made herself too small. Angelika, in Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match, is clever, lonely, and impatient with the limits around her. Even when the premise is funny, Thorne keeps one eye on self-belief, vulnerability, and the risk of asking for more.

And then she lets the weirdness in.

Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match takes Mary Shelley's world and turns it into a playful gothic romance full of carriages, corpses, and a hero who wakes up without a past. Rosie and the Dreamboat, her 2024 short story, swings the other way, light, fast, and sweet, with a spa disaster, a rescue, and a meet-cute built mostly on voice and imagination. That range is part of the fun with Thorne. She will give you sharp banter in one book and a stitched-together suitor in the next.

She has also talked about writing slowly and building each book as its own little world. One of the nicest examples is Second First Impressions, which grew out of old office daydream emails with a close work friend about ending up as rich old ladies in a retirement villa, bossing handsome assistants around. It is a very Sally Thorne kind of origin story, funny, specific, a little absurd, and strangely sweet.

Today she still lives in Canberra with her husband. By her own description, home is a small house full of vintage toys, too many cushions, and a haunted dollhouse, and she now has a pug puppy named Dottie. She also likes driving a yellow 1972 Volkswagen Beetle and traveling to Japan, which fits the offbeat, romantic energy of her books.