This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World

“Frequently, while listening to an account of something horrific, there will be a moment when I think to myself: this is also a love story.” Described by Sally Rooney as “the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read”, Irish foreign correspondent Hayden’s debut book My Fourth Time, We Drowned deservedly won a raft of awards, including the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. In her profoundly affecting second book, Hayden shares some of the many love stories she has collected while reporting from some of the world’s most turbulent places. While witnessing human beings in crisis, she began to wonder whether “the world might be a different place if we more regularly told news stories through the prism of love”. Among those we meet in This Is Also a Love Story are a Ukrainian couple devoted to each other despite the ongoing war that constantly separates them; a group of Syrian women, who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice; survivors of the Rwandan genocide, supported by “artificial families” who took the place of their own lost loved ones. And a Nigerian mother who went to extreme lengths to protect her daughter from abduction by Boko Haram. It would be misleading to say this is an unequivocally uplifting book. But it is salutary to be reminded of the spotlights of love and altruism that illuminate even the darkest of stages. Hayden has written it “in the hope it will give readers cause for reflection on the links that bind us all together, near and far”.