What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel in which a bus travels from Hell to Heaven?

C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about a bus journey from Hell to Heaven is The Great Divorce. The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, while Lewis’s book presents a theological and imaginative contrast between the two destinations.

The narrator boards a bus in a bleak, shadowy realm and travels toward a brighter country. There, passengers encounter figures who invite them to abandon habits and desires that prevent them from accepting joy and reality.

The book is structured as an allegorical fantasy rather than a conventional travel story. Lewis uses conversations and symbolic encounters to examine freedom, repentance, self-deception, and the nature of heaven and hell.

The Great Divorce is sometimes confused with The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis’s first published book of Christian allegory, which appeared in 1933. It is also separate from The Problem of Pain, a nonfiction work published in 1940.