Which 1933 novel by C.S. Lewis follows a pilgrimage through a surreal landscape?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is C.S. Lewis’s 1933 novel about a pilgrimage through a surreal landscape.

The book was Lewis’s first published work of prose fiction. Its title echoes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but Lewis’s story presents a modern intellectual and spiritual journey. The protagonist, John, leaves his home after seeing an unsettling island and encounters symbolic figures and places on the way.

Lewis described the novel as an allegorical account of his own movement toward Christianity, while also exploring political, philosophical, and cultural ideas. Its symbols can be difficult to decode, and Lewis later acknowledged that some of its allusions were too private or specialized for many readers. The work predates the Narnia books and belongs to a more explicitly philosophical phase of his fiction.