WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Here’s looking at you, kid
DEBRA BENITA SHAW applauds the Booker prize winner: a short but powerful story urging us to save the planet
First gathering of two Chinese astronaut crews (Shenzhou 14 and 15) on Tiangong on November 30, 2022
[China Manned Space Engineering Office/CC] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Orbital
Samantha Harvey, Vintage, £9.99
SAMANTHA HARVEY’S Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis.
While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.
On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it all.
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The Wretched of the Earth has been translated into South Africa’s Zulu language. Its translator MAKHOSAZANA XABA explains why Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary book still matters and why is it important that books like this be available in isiZulu