What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about heaven and hell?

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about heaven and hell.

The Great Divorce was published in book form in 1945. It is a short allegorical fantasy in which a narrator takes a bus from a dreary, gray version of hell to the outskirts of heaven. The passengers encounter bright spiritual beings who invite them to surrender the habits and desires that keep them separated from joy.

Lewis drew inspiration from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but his own title reverses Blake’s phrase. The “divorce” in Lewis’s book refers to the incompatibility between heaven and hell, rather than to a legal marriage ending. The work uses imaginative scenes and conversations to examine freedom, repentance, selfishness, and the consequences of choice.

The book is often grouped with Lewis’s Christian apologetics, but it is fiction rather than a systematic theological treatise. Its dreamlike structure allows Lewis to present moral arguments through characters and symbolic encounters.