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.

Praise for My Fourth Time, We Drowned:

‘Journalism of the most urgent kind’ Financial Times

‘The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read’ Sally Rooney, author of Intermezzo

‘One of the most important testaments of this awful time in life's history. It is both heartbreaking and stoic. I cry reading any page of it. Sally Hayden is a young and brilliant journalist’ Edna O'Brien, author of The Little Red Chairs

‘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

‘What a devastating book about the catastrophic inhumanity of European migration policy. It’s a journalistic masterpiece. Shattering stories. It absolutely demands to be read … Essential’ Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers

‘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

Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist, photographer and author. She is an international correspondent for the Irish Times and has reported all over the world for an array of outlets, including CNN International, TIME, the BBC, the New York Times and Al Jazeera. Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route – about the treatment of refugees trying to seek safety in Europe – won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award, the Michel Déon Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. She was included on the Forbes '30 Under 30' media figures in Europe in 2019. In 2022, she won the International Award at Irish Tatler's Women of the Year Awards. She is also an adjunct professor at the UCD Sutherland School of Law.