Every year, around Christmas time, the Guardian publishes a book of its best articles of the year – the Bedside Guardian.

With the best will in the world, when we launched Beyond the blade this spring, we could not have predicted a year like this. Since mid-April there have been an election, three terrorist attacks and the horrific tragedy at Grenfell Tower.

There were two moments in particular when Mojgan Khayatian realised that the racism faced by her brother, Bijan Ebrahimi, went beyond the crude bigotry of individuals to the callous indifference of institutions.

For the first few weeks of Quamari Serunkuma-Barnes’s short life, he did not have a name. “He was my only son and I wanted it to mean something,” says his mother, Lillian Serunkuma, who has two older daughters. “So I didn’t want to rush it.”