The Wall in the Head is a collection of nine short stories that capture people at moments of intense pressure in their lives-pressures that force them to re-examine who they are and what they believe to be true.

Writing fiction, in "Under the Moving Car," Michael Carman tells of a single mother who doesn't hesitate to crawl under a moving car to rescue a little boy. In "The Employee," a "company man" panics at his desk under corporate surveillance. In "In Italy," a strange man narrates his professed love for his fiancée, seemingly unaware that his behavior terrifies her.

Weaving narrative nonfiction from her own life, Carman describes making a purposeful car trip to visit an abandoned concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall fell; there she confronts old memories that change her life. A few years later, traveling in post-Apartheid South Africa, she and her husband endure a hair-raising bus ride through the Drakensburg Mountains, trying to untangle the confusions of experiencing both the beauty and the violence of nature, amid the complex oppressions of the country's social restrictions. "Mingo Junction" is the heartbreaking story of her childhood confrontation with death in a steel mill town in Ohio just after World War II.

People under pressure come alive in these stories-caught in the squeeze between understanding and misunderstanding each other, in societies that build walls between people on a larger scale-walls personal and political, echoing each other.