Six great reads – best of 2025: a deep-cover KGB agent, Zadie Smith on Tracy Chapman, and the boy who came back

‘Prince Andrew believed having sex with me was his birthright’: Virginia Giuffre on her abuse at the hands of Epstein, Maxwell and the king’s brother

The Guardian’s extract of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir in October began a seismic series of reactions that culminated in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor losing his royal titles.

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‘Gateway to hell’: a young reporter’s harrowing two years in besieged Gaza

Malak A Tantesh covered the war in Gaza for years as life around her was devastated. Before leaving the territory to come to study in the UK, Malak wrote this stunning testimony of two years in the “gateway to hell”, with photographs from her sister Enas.

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The boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max

Archie Bland wrote an unforgettable account of the against-all-odds survival of his son Max, who suddenly stopped breathing in the middle of the night in 2023. His precise and beautifully written piece tackled the precariousness of life as well as the often invisible struggles, and joys, of parenting a child with disability.

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‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son

It took five years for Shaun Walker to persuade a former KGB spy, codenamed “the Inheritor”, to tell his story. This jaw-dropping long read told the story of a man whose father recruited him as a teenager and set him up with a bewildering double life.

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Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’

In this essay by the author Zadie Smith, she explored how the sight of the also incomparable Tracy Chapman (above) at the 1988 Free Nelson Mandela concert changed her perception of what music and the people who make it could be.

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Rogue doctors stole one woman’s eggs to get another patient pregnant. What happened next is an unlikely tale of friendship against the odds

Jenny Kleeman’s features for our Saturday magazine are always unmissable. This story is about Renée Ballou, who discovered that rogue fertility doctors stole her eggs and gave them to another woman, who then became pregnant.

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