The 1908 Tunguska comet changes the direction of history and gives rise to a weird new reality in this acclaimed epic from the Polish author

The opening sentence of this remarkable novel announces that the reader is in for an intriguing experience. “On the fourteenth day of July 1924, when the tchinovniks of the Ministry of Winter came for me, on the evening of that day, on the eve of my Siberian Odyssey, only then did I begin to suspect that I did not exist.” It may hint at Kafka in the ominous arrival of officials, or Borges in its metaphysical conundrum, but stranger things are afoot. In 1924 there was no tsar, let alone his bureaucrats, the tchinovniks. The date is significant, but I don’t mind admitting I had to find out why online. The time, as Hamlet says, is out of joint.

The rudely awakened sleeper is Benedykt Gierosławski, a Polish philosopher, logician, mathematician and gambler whose debts will be erased if he undertakes a special mission for the Ministry. He is to travel to Siberia, “the wild east”, and find his father, Filip, who was exiled there for anti-government activities. This is not clemency. Filip is now known as Father Frost, and as a geologist, radical and mystic, he might have a connection with what has occurred. The reader is drip-fed the details. A comet fell into Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, as it did in our universe. But here the event has caused the emergence of an inexplicable, expanding, possibly sentient coldness called the “gleiss”. Ice, which won the European Union prize for literature, came out in Poland in 2007, well before the Game of Thrones TV adaptation made “winter is coming” a meme; but in this novel, it certainly is.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Marina Malikova/Getty Images/500px

© Photograph: Marina Malikova/Getty Images/500px

© Photograph: Marina Malikova/Getty Images/500px

With a turn by Mark Hamill and a saltily suggestive catchphrase for Patrick, the fourth SpongeBob film shows that anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom

Could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on, even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations, in that the series has a capacity for tickling adults’ funny bones – possibly even those now fully grown students – as well as the very young. Though it can’t claim anything quite as unexpected as the David Hasselhoff cameo in 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one – feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.

Preceded by a festive short for Paramount’s other weathered babysitters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new SpongeBob film soon settles into a familiarly goofy groove, its script a PG-rated treatise on the pros and cons of growth. This SpongeBob (once more voiced by Tom Kenny) is now 36 clams high, a source of particular excitement as this will allow him to ride the rollercoaster of his dreams. (One early, trippy laugh: our overexcitable hero’s imagined loop-the-loops.) As in the best contemporary American animation, though, the corkscrew plotting is the real rollercoaster. SB’s quest to obtain the fabled swashbuckler certificate that will prove him a “big guy” brings him into conflict with the Flying Dutchman, voiced by the suddenly ubiquitous Mark Hamill.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Shutterstock

Memoirs from Liza Minnelli and Lena Dunham, essays by David Sedaris and Alan Bennett’s diaries are among the highlights of the year ahead

Over the past year we’ve been spoiled for memoirs from high-wattage stars – Cher, Patti Smith and Anthony Hopkins among them. But 2026 begins with a very different true story, from someone who never chose the spotlight, but now wants some good to come of her appalling experiences. After the trial that resulted in her husband and 50 others being convicted of rape or sexual assault, Gisèle Pelicot’s aim is to nurture “strength and courage” in other survivors. In A Hymn to Life (Bodley Head, February) she insists that “shame has to change sides”. Another trial – of the men accused of carrying out the Bataclan massacre – was the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s most recent book, V13. For his next, Kolkhoze (Fern, September), the French master of autofiction turns his unsparing lens back on himself, focusing on his relationship with his mother Hélène, and using it to weave a complex personal history of France, Russia and Ukraine. Family also comes under the microscope in Ghost Stories (Sceptre, May) by Siri Hustvedt, a memoir of her final years with husband Paul Auster, who died of cancer in 2024.

Hollywood isn’t totally out of the picture, though: The Steps (Seven Dials, May), Sylvester Stallone’s first autobiography, follows the star from homelessness in early 70s New York to Rocky’s triumph at the Oscars later that decade. Does achieving your creative dreams come at a price, though? Lena Dunham suggests as much in Famesick (4th Estate, April), billed as a typically frank memoir of how how her dramatic early success gave way to debilitating chronic illness. Frankness of a different kind is promised in More (Bloomsbury, September), actor Gillian Anderson’s follow-up to her bestselling 2024 anthology of women’s sexual fantasies, Want.

Continue reading...

© Illustration: David Newton/Photo by David Levene

© Illustration: David Newton/Photo by David Levene

© Illustration: David Newton/Photo by David Levene

“I’ve got business to take care of. We’ve got places to go.”

The performing arts center’s board of directors, chaired by President Trump, voted unanimously last week to rename the institution after the commander-in-chief, dubbing it the Trump Kennedy Center. 

"I love Cardinal Dolan. He's the wonderful shepherd of this huge flock in the metropolitan New York area," one mass-goer said. "And he's real.

From the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to Donald Trump’s territorial wishlist, test your travel knowledge. Every answer is the name of a country

Name the six countries or territories Donald Trump has said or suggested he would like to annex, acquire or take control of.

Continue reading...

© Composite: Phil Hackett; Getty Images; Python/Allstar; Alamy

© Composite: Phil Hackett; Getty Images; Python/Allstar; Alamy

© Composite: Phil Hackett; Getty Images; Python/Allstar; Alamy

Please don’t ever offer me cranberry sauce with my roast turkey – that’s just jam on your Christmas dinner, and who wants that?

As a grumpy old woman in the prime of my pedantry, I have already died on many hills, and I have the scars to prove it. I have sacrificed myself on the battlefield of patriarchy chicken, by walking square into people who stride down the centre of the pavement staring at their phones and expecting everyone else to jump out of their way. I have risked life and limb in a pub full of football fans by declaring my belief that the only “real sports” are running fast, jumping high and throwing or swimming far – the rest are just “games”. And I have driven myself to tears by consistently walking into the same branch of Pret a Manger and ordering the same coffee, please, “and nothing else”, and then standing there blankly when I’m invariably asked, “And anything else?” When it comes to defending arbitrary red lines, my belligerence knows no bounds.

And yet, with Christmas approaching, I have been trembling at the thought of strapping on my armour and fighting yet again for what I truly believe: that meat and fruit should never be served on the same plate. And yes, you perverts, I do mean turkey and cranberry sauce – just stop putting jam on your Christmas dinner!

Katy Guest is a Guardian Opinion deputy editor and a style guide editor

Continue reading...

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Figures from FoI request show increase in ministerial use of social media personalities to present campaigns

More than half a million pounds has been spent since 2024 on using social media influencers to promote UK government campaigns on subjects ranging from the environment to welfare.

The spending has included hiring 215 influencers since 2024, of which there were 126 in 2025 – an increase on the 89 hired in 2024 – and is seen as an attempt to use platforms such as TikTok to reach younger people.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

© Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

© Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

The award-winning star of Say Nothing and Trespasses refuses to play the fame game when they can fight government inaction. They open up on making amazing TV … and why morals matter more than nice handbags

Few people are less daunted about the prospect of turning 30 than Lola Petticrew. “I used to be so afraid of getting old, and now I just think it’s the best thing ever,” they say. “I feel like I’m just coming into myself. And it feels fucking amazing. I think it’s such a fantastic thing to age – all the shit starts falling away and what you care about becomes more concentrated. I know what I want my life to be now, and I’m pretty stern on it. I don’t have to care about anything else.”

They’re telling me this over Zoom from New York, where Petticrew is shooting Furious, the new show by Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl, Dying for Sex). Petticrew plays a character who was sex-trafficked as a child and is now out for revenge, tailed by an FBI agent played by Emmy Rossum.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Dave Benett/Max Cisotti/Getty Images for Disney+

© Photograph: Dave Benett/Max Cisotti/Getty Images for Disney+

© Photograph: Dave Benett/Max Cisotti/Getty Images for Disney+

The odds of matching all six Powerball numbers are a mere 1 in 292,201,338.

It’s a pick and enroll.

From the Indigenous doctor balancing traditional and western medicine to a father risking death to provide for his family in Gaza, these are some of the people whose determination and bravery stood out

In 2012, Adana Omágua Kambeba travelled 4,000km (2,500 miles) from her home in Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, to take up a coveted place to study medicine at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in south-east Brazil. She became the first among her people, the Kambeba, or Omágua, to graduate in the field, still largely dominated by white elites. According to the 2022 census, Indigenous people represented 0.1% of those who graduated in medicine in Brazil.

Adana Kambeba uses the ancestral knowledge of her people alongside conventional medicine in her work. Photograph: Marizilda Cruppe/the Guardian

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Marizilda Cruppe/The Guardian

© Photograph: Marizilda Cruppe/The Guardian

© Photograph: Marizilda Cruppe/The Guardian

It was our first joint family Christmas, and I watched fearfully as my mum walked into the kitchen she had once called hers. The next 48 hours were full of surprises

There are still moments I pinch myself: when, over the remnants of turkey and red wine, my divorced parents regale us all with an in-joke from their previous life. When, on the pre-lunch walk, my dad and stepdad stroll in lockstep and talk about finance and even feelings, occasionally. When we’ve all exchanged gifts, and the most thoughtful gifts are not between husband and wife or parent and child, but ones the divorced and remarried couples have given each other.

We’ve been doing this for 25 years now, this joint family Christmas, complete with step-parents, parents and siblings. But every so often, I remember how weird it all once felt. The first time, when I was 11 years old, I watched fearfully as, on Christmas Eve, my mum walked into the kitchen she once called hers. Despite her initial efforts to pretend otherwise, it was clear she still knew where everything lived – and that the next 48 hours would be easier if she admitted it.

Continue reading...

© Composite: Guardian Design; handout

© Composite: Guardian Design; handout

© Composite: Guardian Design; handout

When the band played their homecoming shows, the city council attempted to discourage ticketless fans from an area that became known as ‘Gallagher Hill’. But, realistically, nothing could keep them away ...

‘If you lot are listening on the hill … Bring It on Down,” Liam Gallagher said from the stage, dedicating the Oasis track to ticketless fans who had gathered in Heaton Park. When the band played their run of Manchester homecoming shows in July, an estimated 10,000 people made their way to what became known as “Gallagher Hill” over the five-night run.

The Manchester shows were the only UK gigs that took place in a public space, as opposed to stadiums. Manchester city council had warned those without tickets to stay away, going so far as to erect another fence to block the view when word began to spread that people were gathering. But all attempts to discourage them were futile, as word about the “electric” atmosphere spread on social media.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Ryan Jenkinson/Ryan Jenkinson | MEN Media

© Photograph: Ryan Jenkinson/Ryan Jenkinson | MEN Media

© Photograph: Ryan Jenkinson/Ryan Jenkinson | MEN Media

Chuck Redd canceled his Christmas Eve concert at the Kennedy Center in protest after President Donald Trump's name was added to the iconic Washington, D.C., venue.

The debut followed the North’s first test of a new surface-to-air missile and the arrival of a U.S. nuclear-powered attack sub for a port call in South Korea.

© Korean Central News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A video of a child crying over her broken A.I. chatbot stirred up conversation in China, with some viewers questioning whether the gadgets are good for children. But the girl’s father says it’s more than a toy; it’s a family member.

The vote in Myanmar, widely seen as a sham, is a bid for legitimacy by the military government. It is also a way for Beijing to exert its influence there.

© Pool photo by Andres Martinez Casares

The first draft essentially called for Ukraine’s surrender. The revised version includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression.

© Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

Chuck Redd, a jazz musician, said he canceled his annual concert after President Trump’s name was affixed to the Washington building’s facade.

© Eric Lee for The New York Times

Fresh blast rocks site in Moscow where Russian general was killed on Monday

© AP

Most major supermarkets are closed on Christmas Day

© Getty/iStock

Many retirement developments serve as a tranquil refuge for older people who can no longer traveling to faraway places or engaging in bold adventures

© ASSOCIATED PRESS