Sally Hayden started her career as a foreign correspondent in Rwanda in 2014, twenty years after the genocide that killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Since then she has covered countless wars and their aftermath, followed the routes of forcible migrations, chronicled many human and civil rights abuses and documented innumerable cases of corruption. Her book on smuggled and drowned refugees won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. These are not, she admits, ‘happy’ stories. Witnessing extremes of violence and repression and registering the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators cause anger and sadness but can also give rise to a ‘blunting ennui’ and a sense of futility and cynicism. In one recent survey, almost half the people canvassed said they had altogether given up following the news.

In this new book Hayden changes tack. She has decided to write not about brutality and exploitation but about love, and the need, in times of violence and inequality, to be reminded that humanity has its positive side. The result might have been sentimental. But Hayden is too experienced a journalist and too good a writer to permit herself that self-indulgence. This Is Also a Love Story is in fact both heartening and fascinating: in the interstices of horror and anguish, she discovers tales of emotional resilience and compassion, proving her point that something of mankind’s better nature lurks in the most unlikely places.

One of her first ports of call is Rwanda. In 2014 she wrote about the murdered people posted on the Wall of Names, the means of their deaths neatly and horrifyingly recorded. Now she returns to something that intrigued her at the time, the existence of groups of ‘artificial families’,