Which 1945 C.S. Lewis novel follows a narrator’s journey on a bus from a grey town?

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel about a narrator who travels by bus from a grey town to a brighter country. The short work uses an imaginative afterlife journey to explore choices about joy, desire, repentance, and reality.

The narrator meets several ghostly passengers and bright inhabitants during the visit. Their conversations present moral and spiritual ideas through scenes rather than through a conventional theological argument. Lewis described the work as a fantasy, and its title alludes to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The book is sometimes mistaken for a direct sequel to a Narnia novel because both use vivid fantasy landscapes and talking characters. It is not part of the Narnia series. It is also distinct from Lewis’s nonfiction works The Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity, although all three address Christian themes. The grey town and the bus journey are the story’s most recognizable images.