Need something brilliant to read over the holidays? Here are six of our best pieces from 2025. Look out for part two next Saturday
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.
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.
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.
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.
