European society was historically divided into a general hierarchy known as the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the hoi polloi—that is, everyone else. Working along those lines, the Parliament of the United Kingdom classifies its members in a similar system: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons. It was during a sitting of the House of Commons that Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament in the late 18th century, apparently identified a new type of estate.

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century historian, in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History. Both he and Burke recognized the strange contradiction experienced by journalists: the necessity of being both part of and separate from the world, of creating impartial accounts of tumultuous events even as they’re living through them—something Sally Hayden understands only too well.

European society was historically divided into a general hierarchy known as the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the hoi polloi—that is, everyone else. Working along those lines, the Parliament of the United Kingdom classifies its members in a similar system: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons. It was during a sitting of the House of Commons that Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament in the late 18th century, apparently identified a new type of estate.

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century historian, in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History. Both he and Burke recognized the strange contradiction experienced by journalists: the necessity of being both part of and separate from the world, of creating impartial accounts of tumultuous events even as they’re living through them—something Sally Hayden understands only too well.

Hayden, an award-winning Irish journalist and author, has spent her career living out the maxim that good journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, often reporting from war zones, disaster sites, and politically unstable regions fraught with violence. Her work has helped the rest of the world understand what’s happening on the ground in real time, and to say that she has risked her life in order to be a voice for the voiceless is not an exaggeration. But she is also keenly aware that the zoomed-out journalistic view, which is necessary for relaying the broad scope of a situation in brief and digestible communiqués, means sacrificing details about the people involved, smoothing out the texture of their lives and folding it into the larger story. Often, only the direst information remains, while the personal—the relationships, the love—is left out.

This troubling reality is what led Hayden to write her second book, This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter’s Search for Goodness in a Cruel World. In it, she looks at crisis situations at a human level, telling stories that show how love—frequently manifesting as bravery, selflessness, and tenacity—shapes these events just as much, if not more so, than cruelty, greed, and abuses of power. That might sound like treacly Hallmark nonsense; in Hayden’s capable hands, however, it’s anything but.

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This is Also a Love Story is an ambitious book, covering a lot of ground both geographically and thematically. Each chapter considers a different country and is organized around a different aspect of love, such as unlawful queer love in Ghana and the love of chosen families created in Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 genocide. The bulk of the countries featured in the book are in Africa and the Middle East, mapping onto where Hayden’s career has taken her, though she also writes about Ukraine and Japan. In each place, she follows several individuals, offering multiple perspectives on the same theme.

Some of the accounts in the book are fleshed-out versions of stories that Hayden worked on several years ago. For example, she writes about time spent in Nigeria in 2016 and 2017 while reporting on atrocities committed by Boko Haram. The subject of this chapter is the fierce love of mothers protecting their children; the least harrowing story is that of a woman who spent months hiding her 12-year-old daughter in a pit, frightening her daughter’s would-be abductors off by rubbing feces on herself. Here, as elsewhere, Hayden’s language is clear and unsparing: The woman “demonstrated how, while pretending to be mentally unwell, she would pull her other daughters close to her,” she writes. “Flies swarmed around her, attracted to the excrement. This was another ploy to save her younger children.”

In a few cases, Hayden was able to reconnect with previous interview subjects, such as Fadwa Mahmoud, a Syrian woman whom she first interviewed in 2022, a decade after Mahmoud’s husband and son were disappeared by Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime; her story is included in a chapter that highlights the horrors of loving a missing person, someone who may no longer be alive but whose death you may never be able to confirm, leaving you forever trapped in a terrible limbo.

Hayden witnessed the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 more or less firsthand—once it was clear the rebel forces had prevailed, she was able to quickly travel there from her home in Lebanon—and her reporting highlights the ambivalence the liberation sparked in many people. “Exuberance was accompanied by the sudden unveiling of what had previously been only whispered about, a seeping abhorrence,” Hayden writes, describing the emptying of military prisons in characteristically evocative prose. Syria’s newfound freedom was bittersweet for those whose missing family members were still unaccounted for even after all the political prisoners were freed.

Some chapters, on the other hand, are made up of interviews that seem to have been conducted specifically for the book—for example, the one on Ukraine, which focuses on the complications of having a partner who is away fighting on the front lines. The writing in these sections is as excellent as elsewhere in the book, but the stories themselves feel as if they lack the depth of some of the others, perhaps because Hayden has not spent years mulling over and regretting parts of interviews that were left on the cutting room floor. It’s also possible that these chapters feel weaker because they take place outside of the regions from which she typically reports. Still, Hayden for the most part succeeds at knitting all the stories together by finding the common points of humanity across great differences.

Speaking of regret, it (or something approximating it) was one of the catalysts for This Is Also a Love Story. “I have often worried that news reporting is dehumanising, reducing people, and the dense complexity of their lives, to basic facts and figures or overly simplistic and reductive headlines,” writes Hayden in the prologue, clearly calling herself to account for her own role in this dehumanization. At the same time, she admits that she feels “damaged by the violence and impunity” that she has witnessed as a journalist, which has led to a “blunting ennui that harden[ed] into cynicism and a sense of futility.” Countering this sentiment seems to have been another animating factor when it came to choosing her subject matter.

However Hayden may feel about the toll her career has taken on her, This Is Also a Love Story makes it obvious that her empathy is still intact. She has the journalist’s gift of painting detailed pictures without getting bogged down in an excess of descriptive language. The result is a book where her interview subjects feel fully human, with all of the complications that entails, while the chapters themselves are exactly the right length and depth to be thoughtful and engaging without dragging.

Hayden’s focus on love never feels like naiveté or unearned optimism, but rather a call to action. It’s easy for the privileged to engage in a world-weary sort of nihilism, arguing that humanity is terrible and doomed and not worth saving; it’s a way, to put it baldly, for us to talk ourselves into the idea that doing nothing is somehow fine—maybe even laudable. The more difficult truth is that most people are mostly good, and all of us are vulnerable (though some, of course, more than others) to the dangers of war, unrest, and general disaster. But acknowledging this is frightening. It’s much more pleasant to believe that bad things happen to people who might deserve it because of beliefs they hold or choices they have made.

Hayden knows all of this, of course; she experiences it near-daily in her line of work. But rather than being didactic about how grim things are, she instead holds up these lovingly rendered portraits of people caring for each other through difficult times, gently encouraging readers to avoid the temptation to “withdraw into solitude” as a way of coping with their fear and discomfort, but rather to meet the world with “empathy and compassion.” After all, she writes, “what is empathy or compassion but love turned towards humanity itself?”

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The three estates of the realm may no longer be an accurate description of how power, particularly in geopolitics, plays out. But Burke’s idea of a fourth estate—a group that sits outside of the power structure and holds it accountable—feels more necessary than ever as global inequality grows and vulnerable groups are being increasingly left behind.

And yet, as Hayden demonstrates, reporting on a crisis with details like the number of dead, wounded, and displaced can only ever be part of creating that accountability; in order to bring about real change, journalists must find a way to puncture the detachment of the privileged.

This can only be done by adding humanity to that raw data, infusing it with what Hayden refers to as “the elaborate beauty of other people’s existence, including the loves that drive and bind them.”

Fortunately for us, This Is Also a Love Story helps to do just that.