A new book about love in times of crisis across the globe brings readers closer to understanding “what keeps people going”, its launch heard on Friday.This is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World brings to the fore stories of love and connection among those suffering war, displacement and crisis in nine countries.Written by award-winning Irish Times journalist and author Sally Hayden, it highlights several stories including that of a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The book also features survivors orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide who have formed “artificial families”, alongside a man in Lebanon who carried out a bank raid to access his own savings to help fund his father’s medical bills.Hayden’s latest book was launched on Friday by Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, editor of The Irish Times, who described it as “remarkable” and “hopeful”.Hayden’s use of the word “love” is “broad” and “capacious” in that it encompasses romantic and platonic love, as well as the love between parents and their children, and love of place and of community, he said.Mac Cormaic told those present that Hayden wrote of “extraordinary people who find themselves in unthinkable situations”, adding that one chapter in particular stayed with him for “a long time”.[ Foreign correspondent Sally Hayden: I wrote a book about love to remember there is goodness in the worldOpens in new window ]That chapter details how, following the collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024, thousands of Syrians walked to Sednaya prison in search of loved ones who had previously vanished under the dictatorship.Overall, Hayden’s book brings readers closer to answering “what keeps people going?” Mac Cormaic said.“I think Sally has found a persuasive answer.”While there are moments of joy and happiness, he said it is like life itself, “much messier and much more complicated”.Although it reminds readers that they live in a world of cruelty, pain and depravity, “it tells us that even that cannot extinguish the deeply human impulse for goodness”, he said.This is Also a Love Story follows Hayden’s Orwell Prize-winning book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, which delves into the experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary. It was also named the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2022.[ Sally Hayden: ‘You have to be careful not to let your empathy or your humour be torn away’Opens in new window ]Speaking at the launch at Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street in Dublin, Hayden, who reports internationally for The Irish Times, said she had the idea for the book in 2018.At the time, when she was “overwhelmed” with “how many awful things I was witnessing during my first years as a journalist”.This included violence, cruelty, exploitation and inequality across the globe, she said.“Yet I was also aware that there was a totally different side to the crises I was reporting on that wasn’t always understood by those not living through them – how often you see love.”