C.S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce was first published in 1945.
The Great Divorce is a short theological fantasy about a bus journey from a bleak, shadowy version of Hell to the outskirts of Heaven. The narrator encounters passengers who must decide whether they will accept reality and joy or cling to habits, resentments, and self-deception. Lewis presents these encounters through imaginative dialogue rather than as a conventional adventure plot.
The book was written during the later years of the Second World War and appeared in the same broad period as several of Lewis’s major Christian works. Its title alludes to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, while its setting also echoes ideas found in Dante and George MacDonald.
The Great Divorce is sometimes mistaken for a direct sequel to The Screwtape Letters, but the two books use different structures and settings. The earlier book is an epistolary satire published in 1942; The Great Divorce uses a first-person journey to explore competing moral choices.