What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 fantasy about heaven, hell, and a bus journey?

C.S. Lewis’s 1945 fantasy about heaven, hell, and a bus journey is titled The Great Divorce. The narrator travels by bus from a bleak version of hell to the outskirts of heaven, where visitors confront choices about desire, repentance, and reality.

The book is written as an imaginative theological tale rather than a conventional account of Christian doctrine. Lewis presents heaven and hell through vivid contrasts, including the physical solidity of heaven and the insubstantial nature of the ghosts who arrive from the gray town. Several encounters dramatize how pride, possessiveness, resentment, and self-deception can prevent people from accepting joy.

The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis reverses Blake’s emphasis by insisting on a decisive separation between the two states. The work is sometimes mistaken for a sequel to The Screwtape Letters; both use imaginative treatments of theology, but their structures and narrators differ.