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A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World
by Sally Hayden
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.
"[Hayden] extricates human stories from headlines that numb us to violence and struggle and imbues those stories with courageous complexity and compassion. A vivid and affecting reimagining of both reportage and how its consumers are called to relate to its content." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Hayden's] powerful record reminds readers that wars are fought and witnessed by real people with real relationships, pain, and courage." —Booklist
"Sally Hayden's gorgeous work of reportage shows us that in the midst of war, around the most acute suffering, there is also tremendous heroism. For every act of cruelty and dehumanization and indifference, there is resistance and rebellion that takes the form of compassion, humanity, and love." —Nathan Thrall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
"A deeply moving and necessary book. The news may move from horror to horror, but Hayden pauses, returns, looks through violence and atrocity to find the greater, gentler forces that hold people together. She gives us something to hold on to, in dark times." —Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren
This information about This Is Also a Love Story was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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