On Sally Hayden’s This Is Also a Love Story, and the dangerous business of looking for goodness without looking away

Sally Hayden | Fourth Estate | Published 21 May 2026

Hayden is not asking us to look away from atrocity. She is asking us to notice what else was in the room.

Love has suffered badly at the hands of publishing. It has been foiled in pink, stranded beneath Tuscan sunsets, squeezed into taglines and made to do unspeakable things beside photographs of clasped hands. A bookseller might therefore be forgiven for approaching a book about love in the world’s worst places with one eyebrow already raised. We know the shape of the promised redemption arc: the correspondent sees terrible things, finds hope, and comes home bearing an antidote.

Sally Hayden’s second book is not that book. The clue is in the title, where the load-bearing word is not ‘love’ at all. It is ‘also’. This is also a love story. The atrocity remains. The invasion, genocide, persecution, abduction, imprisonment, hunger and loss are not softened, cancelled or politely moved out of shot. Hayden simply insists that they were never the whole frame.

That distinction matters now. The Digital News Report Ireland 2026 found that 47 per cent of Irish adults sometimes or often avoid the news, up six points in a year. This is easily misread as indifference. Often it is closer to saturation: the nervous system putting up a small handwritten sign that says CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. We are not necessarily tired of other people’s lives. We are tired of being shown those lives only at the point of catastrophe, stripped of texture, humour, history and agency, then asked to absorb the next disaster before breakfast.

I should declare an interest: I am a news junkie, but an exhausted one. I do not want the news and I cannot stop reading it. I read the good sources, the bad sources and the completely bonkers, this-is-mad sources, partly from compulsion and partly from the suspicion that somewhere between the sober briefing, the packaged narrative and the man shouting in capitals lies something that feels closer to real. Much of the time I feel less informed than handled. I could have written this long read from reviews and the many interviews Hayden has given. It might have been easier, though not necessarily quicker: she is a respected, well-connected journalist, and when she has something to say, people rightly want to hear it. But writing around the book would have let me avoid what reading it does not: feeling.

The trouble with ‘good news’

Hayden is unusually well placed to interrogate this. A correspondent for The Irish Times, she won both the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the An Post Irish Book of the Year for My Fourth Time, We Drowned, her account of refugees trapped in Libya and the European policies that helped trap them there. In 2025 she was named Irish Journalist of the Year. These are the credentials of someone who has not spent her career avoiding darkness.

The book began in professional self-suspicion. After years of reporting war, displacement and state violence, Hayden found herself questioning not merely what journalism shows, but what its habitual forms teach us to see. A person enters the news as ‘a victim’, is granted a sentence of biography and an adjective such as resilient and disappears when the story moves on. The facts may be accurate while the life is still falsified.

So Hayden goes back. Across nine countries she revisits people and places she has reported on before, asking what becomes visible when love is treated not as decorative relief but as evidence. It is a dangerous method. Go looking for goodness and, astonishingly, you may find it. The question is whether you have discovered a truth or merely selected a more comforting angle. Hayden is sensible enough not to solve this in the prologue and hand us all a scented candle. She lets the objection follow her through the book.

The ordinary machinery of staying alive

The most persuasive stories are often the least grand. In Ukraine, Sergei is a marine who retrained as a make-up artist. Irina remembers falling for him partly through the pleasure he took in the ham she made for their first date. During the full-scale invasion, she keeps a folder of cheerful, lipsticked photographs to send him on the days when cheerfulness has to be manufactured. Not fake. Assembled. Maintained. Love as one more necessary piece of wartime equipment, somewhere between the phone charger and the tourniquet.

In Mosul, couples married under ISIS with the music lowered and the celebrations hidden. One groom notes, with the brisk opportunism of a man determined to extract at least one bargain from tyranny, that weddings were cheaper. Later, near ruins destroyed by ISIS, Hayden hears gunfire and wonders whether fighting has resumed. She is told it is probably a wedding. Same sound, different world. It is a joke, a piece of reportage and the book’s entire thesis compressed into one startled moment.

This is where Hayden is best. She does not turn survival into a motivational poster. She notices the domestic detail that refuses to behave like a small thing: ham, lipstick, a hidden speaker, a joke made by the person who has earned the right to make it. Love here is not a feeling floating above politics. It is work. It is planning, feeding, sending, waiting, remembering and occasionally getting married while trying not to attract the attention of men with guns.

Love is not an alibi

The book becomes more complicated, and more interesting, when love stops being obviously benign. In Rwanda, survivors orphaned by genocide formed ‘artificial families’, assigning themselves parents, siblings and children because the original structures of kinship had been murdered. Hayden returns to the story of Zula Karuhimbi, the self-described witch who sheltered Tutsis and frightened away killers with threats of curses. The language of love makes sense here, but so does the language of reconstruction. These families are tender, certainly. They are also social institutions built in the crater left by political violence.

Uganda is harder. David Ocitti was abducted as a child by the Lord’s Resistance Army and forced into an impossible choice that led to his father’s murder. As an adult he helps former abductees return to communities frightened by what they were forced to become. He speaks of forgiveness as a route to a new page. The testimony is extraordinary. The framing remains perilous. Radical forgiveness is beautiful when it is chosen and monstrous when it is expected. Too many societies have admired the moral beauty of survivors because it saves everyone else the inconvenience of justice.

Hayden knows this, but the chapter could press the question harder: who benefits when the wronged forgive, and what room remains for the person who cannot? Love cannot be allowed to become an alibi for power, or a little velvet curtain drawn across accountability. The book is strongest when it lets love disturb the political story, not replace it.

Who gets to tell the story?

The Rwanda chapter contains another lesson. When Hayden tried to return in 2024, she was prevented from boarding her flight. She was never formally told why, but connects it to her reporting on Rwanda’s treatment of refugees. The chapter therefore had to be reported partly at a distance. Its comparative thinness of texture is a weakness on the page, but the cause of that weakness is itself part of the story. The state does not merely shape events. It can decide who is allowed to witness them, return to them and gather their afterlives.

In Ghana, where queer people faced an attempt to intensify criminalisation, Hayden uses WhatsApp voice notes. The chapter becomes more choral and less visibly controlled by the reporter. The form is not a flourish. Under surveillance, the voice note is a safer unit of testimony. The book’s argument is therefore carried not only by what it reports, but by who is permitted to speak and how their speech reaches us.

This matters because journalism’s power is not confined to deciding which suffering qualifies as news. It also decides the size and shape of the container. A person may be reduced to a quote because there are 700 words and a deadline. A country may be introduced chiefly through the terrible thing currently happening there. Hayden’s project is an attempt, imperfect but serious, to return volume to lives compressed by the news cycle.

The stories left after the headline

In northeast Nigeria, long after the hashtag moved on, families remain marked by Boko Haram’s murders and abductions. Hayden reports on two mothers who feigned madness to protect their daughters, making themselves filthy and untouchable so armed men would look elsewhere. There is no uplifting version of this. It is love expressed as self-erasure. Hayden’s restraint is crucial; one soft adjective would feel like theft.

In Lebanon, love complicates the category of crime. During the country’s financial collapse, Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein entered a Beirut bank and threatened to burn it unless he was given access to his own savings, needed for his father’s medical care. Under one frame, this is armed hostage-taking. Under another, it is a son confronting a system that has taken his family’s money and left him with no lawful route to retrieve it. Hayden refuses to collapse the two readings into one another. That refusal is the ethical work.

Syria brings the book to the limits of what a reporter can ask. Families search for people disappeared into Assad’s prison system. Hayden worries that asking a bereaved woman how she feels is patronising when the answer is obvious. The woman tells her that no additional pain has been caused; the story is already in her mind. Journalism cannot manufacture the wound. At its best, it can refuse to let the world pretend the wound is not there.

Love after death

The final chapter travels to Japan and the Drifting Post, created by Yuji Akagawa for letters addressed to people lost in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. It is the book’s outlier because the catastrophe has no human author. There is no occupying army, militia, prison system or bank against which love can be read as resistance. There is only the sea, the dead and the stubborn human need to continue a conversation after one participant has gone.

That difference is larger than the book quite admits. Elsewhere, love pushes back against organised cruelty. Here it cannot push back against anything. It can only persist. Perhaps that is why the chapter lands with such force. We are used to thinking of love as rescue, solution, triumph. Grief teaches a less marketable version. Love may have no power to alter the ending and still be the thing that survives it.

Irish readers may feel this without requiring much explanation. We are a culture that still talks to the dead, visits them, tends graves, keeps anniversaries and occasionally gives the departed a running commentary on family behaviour. The boundary is managed, not sealed. A postbox for the dead is strange only until you remember how many conversations have been conducted at a headstone in Glasnevin.

What the book does not solve

There are reservations. Nine chapters built on related architecture create some fatigue. The headings occasionally tell us what to feel before the reporting has had a chance to earn it. The Uganda chapter wants more argument around forgiveness. Rwanda, necessarily reported at a remove, lacks some of the sensory authority of the chapters in which Hayden is physically present. Readers who prefer a thesis proved rather than a question lived with may reach the final page wanting firmer conclusions.

The flaws matter, although not quite as a case for the prosecution. In a world increasingly full of AI-smoothed perfection, we may need the seam, the overreach and the question not pushed quite far enough to remind us that a human being made the work and another imperfect human being is reading it. A flaw does not prevent something from being perfect in its own particular way. Sometimes it is the proof that perfection was never the point.

But the refusal to conclude that love is the answer is one of the book’s virtues. Love is not the answer. Sometimes it is not even the right question. It does not stop a missile, open a prison, reverse a genocide or restore a stolen bank deposit. Hayden’s smaller claim is more defensible and, in its way, more radical: love is present. It is part of the evidence. Any account that removes it is not hard-headed realism but another form of distortion.

Kirkus gave the book a starred review and described it as a reimagining of reportage and of the reader’s relationship to it. That is accurate. Hayden is not proposing that news become nicer. Niceness would be fatal here. She is asking it to become fuller: to restore relationships, agency, contradiction and ordinary life to people who otherwise reach us as an image, a number or a terrible noun.

I expected to admire this book. I did not expect it to overwhelm me. Most of us can imagine what happened in these places; that imagined familiarity is part of how we have become inured to horror. What is radical, intense and, at moments, quite astonishing is what the book also is: beautifully written, immediately readable and deeply respectful. Hayden does not explain the humanity of her subjects as though we might otherwise miss it or instruct us when to be devastated. The force comes from restraint, and from her willingness to trust the humanity and intelligence of the reader. It leaves room for feeling, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to run away.

The bookseller’s verdict

This Is Also a Love Story is for the reader who has started avoiding the news and feels vaguely guilty about it; for the person who suspects that empathy has been worn down not by a lack of care, but by care repeatedly summoned and given nowhere to go. The book does not offer optimism as a duty; it offers attention as a practice.

It will not make you feel better. It will make you feel more accurately. There is horror in the room. There is also a joke, a photograph, a cheap wedding, a voice note, a letter to the dead, a mother making an impossible calculation. The word ‘also’ does not cancel what came before it. It refuses to let horror have the final word. It is quite astonishing, far more than I expected and very much worth reading.

Hand it to: readers of My Fourth Time, We Drowned; anyone suffering from news fatigue; and anyone suspicious of hope packaged as an instruction.

Read it beside: Hayden’s own My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Lindsey Hilsum’s I Brought the War with Me, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Lara Marlowe’s Love in a Time of War and Victoria Donovan’s Life in Spite of Everything.

 

Buy This Is Also a Love Story