The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis centres on Olive Smith, who is in the third year of a biology PhD at Stanford and studies pancreatic cancer, the illness that killed her mother. Her best friend has developed a crush on the one man Olive has already been out with, so to prove that the date meant nothing to her Olive kisses the first man who walks past the laboratory. He turns out to be Adam Carlsen, a biology professor and one of the department's least forgiving supervisors, and Olive has to live with what she has done.

The story the two of them invent to explain the kiss grows into an arrangement that both of them keep extending, because it has to convince the people around them that the pair are a couple. Meanwhile Olive is trying to hold her research, her funding and her own judgement of herself together in a department where all three are precarious.

The novel was published on 14 September 2021 by Berkley Books. It had first been posted online in 2018 as a Star Wars fan fiction titled Head Over Feet, built on the Rey and Kylo Ren pairing; for the printed edition the leads became Olive and Adam and the Star Wars references were taken out, and Hazelwood went on to further novels in the same vein, among them Love on the Brain and Not in Love.