This Is Also a Love Story - by Sally Hayden (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds.

We live in an era defined by crisis--whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she's witnessed the incredible goodness of regular people.

In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.

What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us? This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and--as a result--to question what might be needed to create a better world.

Review Quotes

Praise for My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Winner of The 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

"A magnificent, engagé investigative report... [an] act of witness...It is clear from [Hayden's book] that the current politics of immigration have turned & twisted human nature against itself and our own kind and are fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life... [It] strongly convey[s] the urgency of fundamentally rethinking immigration policy... It is already late to act, but that is a poor reason for inaction."
--The New York Review of Books

"[A] landmark work of reportage about the migrant crisis."
--The New Yorker

"Hayden's powerful book relays the harrowing stories migrants have shared with her from their experiences in various Libyan migrant detention centers, from enduring near-starvation conditions to torture and even death...an accessible, critically reported account..."
--The Washington Post

"I frantically underlined journalist Sally Hayden's first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned ... Readers should ... let Hayden's vital reporting make them reconsider their view of what makes a moral world."
--The Baffler

"A deeply researched and harrowing chronicle of the experiences of many refugees fleeing dictatorships, violence, persecution, and war. The book is the culmination of a one-woman fact-finding mission to uncover the myriad abuses faced by migrants hoping to make a better life for themselves in Europe."
--Foreign Policy

About the Author

Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. Sally's work has been featured by The New York Times, the Irish Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, Channel 4 News, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, Die ZEIT, Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times (London), and other outlets across the world. Sally is the winner of the Orwell Prize and the Irish Book of the Year, and she was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the New York Public Library's Helene Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism.