This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World

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.

Author: Sally Hayden
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 06/16/2026
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.60w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781668034620


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2026
Booklist 05/01/2026

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, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, and other outlets across the world. Sally's first book My Fourth Time, We Drowned was the winner of the Orwell Prize and the Irish Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the New York Public Library's Helene Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism.