This is Also a Love Story
- Author Sally Hayden
- Narrator Aoife McMahon
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date 21 May 2026
- Run Time 7 hours and 15 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Corruption in politics, government and society, Refugees and political asylum, Relationships: friends / peer groups, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, True stories of heroism, endurance and survival, True stories of survival of abuse and injustice.
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What to expect
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 international correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career covering some of the darkest moments of our time, and yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the love and care of everyday people.
In This is Also a Love Story, Hayden 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 learn about letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan.
In stories that crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Rwanda to Iraq, 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 dehumanise 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.
Critics Review
n Praise for This is Also a Love Story:n
n‘In this original and heart-warming book, Sally Hayden chronicles both the astonishing acts of bravery that love inspires, as well as the touchingly ordinary connections people make in extraordinary times. By finding beauty amidst ugliness, she finds a way of making our fractured world whole again’ Lindsey Hilsum, author of I Brought The War With Me
n‘Profoundly affecting … it is salutary to be reminded of the spotlights of love and altruism that illuminate even the darkest of stages’ Bookseller
nn Praise for My Fourth Time, We Drowned:n
n‘The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read’ Sally Rooney, author of Intermezzo
n‘A veritable masterclass in journalism … The most riveting, detailed and damning account ever written on the deadliest of migration routes’ Christina Lamb, author of Our Bodies, Their Battlefields
n‘The triumph of the book is to inject a renewed urgency and moral clarity into a story most people think they are familiar with’ The Times
n‘[A] devastating, moving and damning account of one of the tragedies of our age’ Irish Independent
n‘Journalism of the most urgent kind’ Financial Times
n‘A journalistic masterpiece. Shattering stories. It absolutely demands to be read … Essential’ Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
n‘Heart-stopping … A vital book for anyone who wants to feel what it means to be human in the 21st century’ Fintan O’Toole, author of We Don’t Know Ourselves
nMore from the same
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