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

The grey city in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is called the Grey Town. The 1945 allegorical novella begins with passengers leaving this bleak, insubstantial city on a bus journey toward a brighter country.

The Grey Town represents a condition of spiritual isolation and dissatisfaction. Its inhabitants quarrel, complain, and continually move farther apart because the city seems to expand without limit. Lewis contrasts it with the solid country, where reality, joy, and holiness are overwhelming to the visiting ghosts.

The title refers to a “divorce” between heaven and hell, not to an ordinary marital separation. The work is not a direct retelling of Dante’s Divine Comedy, although it shares a journey-based imaginative structure and a concern with the afterlife. The Celestial City is associated with the destination beyond the solid country, but it is not the name of the grey city.