When a bomb explodes in a university cafe, nineteen students are killed. The Empty Space begins with the identification of these slain students. Slowly, each individual is claimed and taken away for a proper burial by their mourning family members. The final mother to enter the cafe identifies the nineteenth body as her eighteen-year-old son and brings him home in a casket. Not only does she bring home her dead son, though, but also the sole survivor of the blast, a three-year-old boy. By a strange quirk of fate, after the explosion he is found lying in a small empty space, alive and breathing. The Empty Space chronicles the memories of the boy dead, the story of the boy brought home, and the cataclysmic crossing of life and death.

The history of walls - as a way to keep people in or out - is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico-US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh's refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people's lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.

The mother who enters the cafe last to identify the nineteenth body brings home her dead eighteen-year-old son packed in a coffin, as well as the sole survivor of the blast, a three-year-old boy, who by a strange quirk of fate, is found lying in a small empty space, alive and breathing. That Empty Space recounts the memories of the boy gone, the story of the boy brought home, the crossing of their life and death and the mixing up of their identities.