What is the name of the afterlife town in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce?

The afterlife town in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is called the Grey Town. The 1945 book begins there, where the narrator boards a bus for an extraordinary journey to a brighter country.

The Grey Town is portrayed as vast, gloomy, and strangely insubstantial. Its inhabitants can travel enormous distances because their homes and relationships are spread far apart. The setting symbolizes isolation and the way self-absorption can make existence feel empty.

When the passengers arrive in the bright country, they discover that they are ghostlike and physically weak in comparison with the solid inhabitants. Each encounters a figure who urges them to surrender a particular obsession, grievance, or false belief.

The title responds imaginatively to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis’s book is not a formal account of Christian doctrine or a literal map of the afterlife. It is an allegorical fantasy about choices, freedom, desire, and the possibility of refusing joy.