What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1933 allegorical novel about a pilgrim seeking an island?

C.S. Lewis’s 1933 allegorical novel about a pilgrim seeking an island is The Pilgrim’s Regress.

The book was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. Its subtitle, An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, signals the intellectual and religious concerns behind the journey. The protagonist, John, leaves home after seeing an island in the distance and encounters a series of figures and obstacles.

The allegory reflects Lewis’s own movement through atheism, idealism, and Christianity. Its dense references to philosophy, theology, and modern intellectual debates make it less immediately accessible than The Chronicles of Narnia.

The title echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s book is not a sequel. Lewis later wrote that the work had been shaped by his desire to communicate his understanding of Christianity and by his experience of longing, which he called Joy.