This is Also a Love Story

From the Orwell Prize-winning author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned comes a powerful account of human resilience, capturing our capacity for love and connection against all odds.

We live in an era defined by crisis – whether it be war and displacement or climate collapse and rapidly widening inequality. Acclaimed foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the global frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the hope and goodness of people.

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

Reflecting on all that she has learnt, Hayden asks us: what if news was recounted through the prism of the actions 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 recognise how connection, self-sacrifice and love 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.