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

3 hours ago 4

1. ‘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
Virginia Giuffre as a teenager, around the time that she met Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Photograph: Courtesy of Virginia Roberts Giuffre
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.
_{Read more}
2. ‘Gateway to hell’: a young reporter’s harrowing two years in besieged Gaza
Malak A Tantesh with family members in northern Gaza. Photograph: Enas Tantesh/The Guardian
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.
_{Read more}
3. The boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max
Archie Bland with his son Max . Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian
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.
_{Read more}
4. ‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son
Elliot Holar near the campus of Georgetown University. Photograph: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian
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.
_{Read more}
5. Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’
Tracy Chapman performing in 1988. Photograph: William Campbell/Getty Images
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.
_{Read more}
6. Rogue doctors stole one woman’s eggs to get another patient pregnant. What happened next is an unlikely tale of friendship against the odds
Carole Lieber Wilkins and Renée Ballou. Photograph: Matthew Scott/The Guardian
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.
_{Read more}