What is the title of C.S. Lewis's 1945 novel about a bus journey from Hell?

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about a bus journey from Hell.

The Great Divorce is an allegorical novella first published in 1945. Its unnamed narrator boards a bus in a grey, shadowy place identified with Hell and travels to a radiant country associated with Heaven. The passengers are offered the possibility of remaining, but many reject it because they cling to self-centered desires, resentments, or illusions.

Lewis’s title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, while the book’s structure also recalls medieval visionary literature. The work is not a conventional map of Christian doctrine or a literal travel guide to the afterlife. It uses imaginative dialogue and symbolic scenes to examine moral choice.

The bus passengers encounter bright spirits and ghosts, and their conversations reveal why freedom can be refused. The novel is often confused with The Screwtape Letters, another Lewis work about spiritual themes, but that book is written as correspondence from a senior demon to a junior demon.