The Project

Every office has a project that is definitely, absolutely not about the person you got assigned to sit next to. This one holds its professional posture for roughly a week before the whole thing quietly falls apart. Annie Lord has built a novel on the most fragile word in the working world: strictly.

What it's about

Two people, one project, a set of ground rules that everybody involved fully intends to keep. The premise does most of the heavy lifting here, because we have all watched a "purely logistical" collaboration curdle into something with a lot more eye contact than the brief called for. Lord takes that familiar setup (the shared deadline, the late messages that stop being about the deadline) and lets it run its natural, mortifying course. It stays spoiler-light on purpose: the fun is in the slow slide from businesslike to hopeless, not in any single reveal. If you have ever caught yourself rereading a colleague's Slack message for tone, you already know the terrain.

Why everyone's talking about it

Annie Lord arrives with a reputation. As Vogue's longtime dating columnist and the author of the memoir Notes on Heartbreak, she has spent years writing about longing with a sharp, unsentimental eye, which is exactly the pedigree you want steering a romance that could otherwise coast on charm. The chatter around this one has been building toward a simple label: the rom-com pick of 2026. That is a lot of weight for a hook line to carry, so temper expectations accordingly.

This is a book for readers who like their love stories witty, a little anxious and grounded in the small humiliations of modern courtship. If you want a swoony fantasy with no friction, or you find workplace-romance ethics more stressful than fun, this may not be your particular flavor of yearning. For everyone else, the appeal is obvious: banter, restraint and the specific comedy of two adults pretending they have this under control.

The verdict, for now

Worth putting on your list, especially if Emily Henry and Sally Thorne live on your most-reread shelf. Coming from a writer who already knows how to make heartbreak funny, the odds are good that the professional-boundaries-to-personal-disaster arc lands with more wit than most. Go in for the banter, stay for the inevitable moment someone breaks the rules they wrote themselves. The project was never going to survive contact with feelings and honestly, neither were we.