What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1940 book defending Christian belief amid suffering?

C.S. Lewis’s 1940 book defending Christian belief amid suffering is The Problem of Pain.

The Problem of Pain is a work of Christian apologetics in which Lewis addresses why suffering exists if God is good and powerful. He discusses divine goodness, human freedom, sin, animal pain, hell, and the possibility of heaven. The book presents a systematic argument rather than a personal diary of bereavement.

Lewis wrote it before his marriage to Joy Davidman and before the death that later shaped A Grief Observed. That distinction matters because readers sometimes treat the two books as companion accounts of the same experience. The Problem of Pain is philosophical and theological; A Grief Observed is an anguished personal response to loss.

The book was published in 1940, during the Second World War, when questions about evil and suffering were especially urgent. It remains one of Lewis’s most frequently cited apologetic works.