Foreign correspondent and author Sally Hayden on finding light in the dark

Hayden, now in her mid-30s, had the idea for This Is Also a Love Story eight years ago, when she was beginning to question her early certainty that journalists could change the world. “I started working as a journalist in 2014, and already by 2018, I was pretty depressed at the state of the world. I decided I wanted to write this book because, amid all the cruelty I witnessed, I also encountered love daily.” For a time, Hayden had to put the idea aside, overtaken by other things, including the reporting on the migrant crisis that led to her first book. Then, after My Fourth Time, We Drowned was published in 2022, she found she missed working on something longer form, so returned to the idea for This Is Also a Love Story.

While part of Hayden’s motivation for the book was to remind herself of the good in our world (“Like a lot of writers, I also write to make sense of the world for myself,” she tells me) it was also written in the fervent hope that it will give readers cause to reflect on the things that bind us all together. “It’s very strange to me that we live in a world where we are more connected to people far away than ever before, and yet we’re being encouraged to shut off from each other.” Among the epigraphs in the book is this quote from Elon Musk: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.” In her epilogue, Hayden writes: “I have come away from my work over the past decade with the sense that there is a specific kind of detachment crisis going on. The more this is enabled, the more remorseless subsequent actions taken by the powerful will be. Empathy and compassion feel dangerously lacking today. And what is empathy or compassion but love turned towards humanity itself?”

Reading makes us empathetic and more able to understand what it’s like to be someone else. We’ve all been dealt a different hand of cards... So, if we stop imagining what it’s like to be each other, that leads us to a very dangerous place

Hayden completed the writing of This Is Also a Love Story in late 2024 and early 2025, when the previous escalation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon was ongoing. “I write this with the hum of drones above me,” reads the opening line of the book’s prologue. But what struck Hayden most about that time, she goes on to tell us, were the “incessant messages from loved ones, both inside the country and abroad, who are concerned about our wellbeing”, because “what happens to us affects them too. No man, nor woman, is an island”.

It would be misleading to state that This Is Also a Love Story is an unequivocally uplifting book, and indeed Hayden did not want it to be so. “I didn’t want to make it too saccharine or to make out that love conquers all,” she tells me. In many of the stories, it is far from clear whether love will triumph in the dire circumstances in which many of the protagonists find themselves. It is salutary, nevertheless, to be reminded of the spotlights of love and altruism that illuminate even the darkest of stages.

And of the importance of reading stories of the lives of others. Hayden tells me that she was a reader from a young age. “I think that part of my curiosity about the world came from reading both fiction and non-fiction. Reading makes us empathetic and more able to understand what it’s like to be someone else. We’ve all been dealt a different hand of cards – sometimes hugely different. So, if we stop imagining what it’s like to be each other, that leads us to a very dangerous place. I’m not saying books alone can save us from that place but they do play a role in giving us an understanding of our shared humanity.”