Praise for This Is Also a Love Story

"Beautiful and harrowing...There is a through line of fierce and unrelenting love in these stories, revealing each individual’s humanity and worth. Reading This Is Also a Love Story will both break your heart and expand it." —BookPage, STARRED review

"[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

"This Is Also a Love Story is Irish journalist Sally Hayden’s attempt to recoup, recover, or recompense from the ugliness of some of her life’s work—both the violence she covered in conflicts around the globe and her own profession’s frequent cynicism in positioning human suffering for reader clicks. Behind the most sensational headlines, she argues, are real people who struggle, survive, and love one another." —The Boston Globe

"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

"Sally Hayden is a reporter of the first order. This Is Also A Love Story showcases the ethical and intellectual core of her consistently stellar work. In situations of crisis, she seeks out—and finds—humanity at its brightest and most elemental. A searching, deeply moving work that documents how life and love persist against seemingly insurmountable odds." —Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

"Bringing us hope from dark places, this remarkable book is the perfect antidote to our times." —Christina Lamb, author of Our Bodies, Their Battlefield

"Sally Hayden has written a beautiful book, as heart-lifting as it is heartrending. From Lebanon to Syria, Ukraine to Rwanda—places that conjure images of fear and pain, but where there is such potent life to be found. Her attentive, almost devotional retelling of these small stories of the human heart at the centre of international headlines draws you in and holds you mesmerised. But this book is also a search for understanding of herself. It strikes to the very heart of why we, as foreign correspondents, are drawn to these places despite the risk. Because we know what we will find there: love against all odds, and a sense of deep and meaningful connection many of us feel is missing in the modern world. Hayden’s tales lay plain what those of us who live this work know too well: it is often in the midst of the greatest struggles that we find the truest love, laid bare in all its power and intensity. To experience it is to get to the very core of what it means to be alive." —Leila Molana-Allen, Special Correspondent, PBS Newshour

"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, International Editor for Channel 4 News and author of I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line

"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

"When love seems to be in short supply from Gaza to Tehran to Kiev, the stunning new book by the powerful Irish journalist, Sally Hayden, forces us to reassess our pessimism. Love does exist, burning brightly, across the globe, if we want to see it. This isn't a naive call for blind passion in the face of war and genocide but a beautifully penned tribute to what can keep us human in the face of catastrophe. Read this book to lighten your soul." —Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory

“What begins as a quest by a conflict journalist frustrated at the way that news reports can strip a war of its humanity quickly becomes a journey of reaffirmation, through the wonder of humanity, and a glorious revelation: how it is in the world’s darkest corners that you find its most remarkable people. Sally Hayden uncovers miracles. She may be one herself.” —Alex Perry, author of The Blood Will Flow

Praise for My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Winner of The 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

“A magnificent, engagé investigative report… [an] act of witness…It is clear from [Hayden’s book] that the current politics of immigration have turned & twisted human nature against itself and our own kind and are fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life… [It] strongly convey[s] the urgency of fundamentally rethinking immigration policy… It is already late to act, but that is a poor reason for inaction.”
—The New York Review of Books

“[A] landmark work of reportage about the migrant crisis.” 
—The New Yorker

“Hayden’s powerful book relays the harrowing stories migrants have shared with her from their experiences in various Libyan migrant detention centers, from enduring near-starvation conditions to torture and even death…an accessible, critically reported account…”
—The Washington Post

“I frantically underlined journalist Sally Hayden’s first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned … Readers should … let Hayden’s vital reporting make them reconsider their view of what makes a moral world.”
—The Baffler

“A deeply researched and harrowing chronicle of the experiences of many refugees fleeing dictatorships, violence, persecution, and war. The book is the culmination of a one-woman fact-finding mission to uncover the myriad abuses faced by migrants hoping to make a better life for themselves in Europe.” 
—Foreign Policy