Helen Watson White
The Girl from Revolution Road by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh (Allen & Unwin, 2020), 240pp., $36.99
What seems at first to be a book about difference—cultural, religious, social—is actually, in the end, about what holds people together. At every point where these real-life stories of Iranian-born filmmaker Ghazaleh Golbakhsh find resonance with a reader, a bond is formed that comes from the sense of a shared humanity. While I’m aware that that generalisation can be used to override the particular, or the individual, in The Girl from Revolution Road there is no danger of our not recognising difference as a positive value. This is a varied and accessible set of human stories, told from a unique point of view, and the effectiveness of the writing is all in the detail. [Read more…]