Not in Love
Ali Hazelwood, 2024
A prickly biotech engineer and the man who once betrayed her collide over a secret project—and a no-strings affair that refuses to stay casual. The book reads like a tense, witty push-pull: sharp professional rivalry, tender glances, and a longing that keeps breaking through the casual rules.
Feels like longing and tenderness. About love and ambition.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy workplace romance between STEM professionals, witty banter, and a heroine who is more prickly than sweet. The plot leans on a past betrayal and a secret project, so if secrecy-driven conflict tends to frustrate you, that may wear thin.
Why read it
It gives you the pleasure of watching two guarded people negotiate desire and ambition, with enough wit to keep the workplace friction lively.
A page from the book
How it feels to be seen as someone’s exact dream.
I’d never felt more beautiful than when he looked at me. Like I was the final prototype of someone’s entire fantasy life. Ali Hazelwood.Ali Hazelwood is the pen name of a neuroscience professor; she wrote fanfiction for years before her debut, and her novels often pair women in STEM with brooding heroes.
Books that feel like this
More by Ali Hazelwood
The Love Hypothesis
Ali Hazelwood, 2021
To convince her best friend she is over a crush, a graduate student kisses a stranger in a lab hallway — who turns out to be the most feared professor in her department.
Bride
Ali Hazelwood, 2024
A Vampyre raised among Humans is summoned home and offered up as a bride to a Werewolf alpha. Fangs, snark, and a very reluctant alliance.
Love, Theoretically
Ali Hazelwood, 2023
A theoretical physicist pays her student loans by working as a professional fake girlfriend, then meets the one person who seems to see through every version of her.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Not in Love for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy workplace romance between STEM professionals, witty banter, and a heroine who is more prickly than sweet. The plot leans on a past betrayal and a secret project, so if secrecy-driven conflict tends to frustrate you, that may wear thin.
- What is Not in Love like?
- The book reads like a tense, witty push-pull: sharp professional rivalry, tender glances, and a longing that keeps breaking through the casual rules. Feels like longing and tenderness. About love and ambition.
- What should I read after Not in Love?
- If you liked Not in Love, try Better Than the Movies (Lynn Painter), Ugly Love (Colleen Hoover) and It Happened One Summer (Tessa Bailey).
A taste of the feed
A mother, a sundress, a stolen base: the anatomy of a kept memory.
All the neighborhood kids played kickball in the street for hours that night, and the adults even joined us for a game. At one point, my mother was high-fiving Michael after stealing home base in her floral sundress and wedge sandals. That moment was pressed in my memories like a yellowed photograph in an antique album.
Better Than the Movies · Lynn Painter
What love costs when you stop pretending it is beautiful.
Ugly love becomes you. Consumes you. Makes you hate it all. Makes you realize that all the beautiful parts aren’t even worth it. Without the beautiful, you’ll never risk feeling the ugly. So you give it all up. You give it all up. You never want love again, no matter what kind it is, because no type of love will ever be worth living through the ugly love again.
Ugly Love · Colleen Hoover
The compliment that sounds like an insult until it isn’t.
I think you live in a world that’s more interesting than the one most people live in,” he says, and just as my heart starts to sink with disappointment, with a kind of loneliness, he adds, “and I wish I could live in it too.” I feel myself beaming. “I’ll take you sometime.” “I’d like that,” he says.
Great Big Beautiful Life · Emily Henry
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