What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about a bus journey to a strange afterlife?

C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about a bus journey to a strange afterlife is The Great Divorce.

The Great Divorce is a short theological fantasy in which passengers leave a gray, shadowy town on a bus and arrive in a brighter country. The narrator observes conversations between visitors and inhabitants, focusing on the choices that keep people from accepting joy, reality, and transformation. Lewis uses imaginative scenes rather than presenting the book as a systematic description of the afterlife.

The title echoes William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis's work argues in a very different direction. The “divorce” refers to the separation between heaven and hell, and the book explores how self-centered desires can become obstacles to accepting heaven.

The novel was first published in 1945. It is distinct from The Screwtape Letters, another Lewis work using fantasy to examine spiritual questions, and from The Pilgrim's Regress, his 1933 allegorical novel.