Which C.S. Lewis book is a dialogue about heaven, hell, and the afterlife?

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s allegorical dialogue about heaven, hell, and the afterlife. It was published in book form in 1945 and presents a narrator’s bus journey from a bleak, shadowy place toward a brighter country.

The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis’s work, however, is not a direct adaptation of Blake’s poem. It uses imaginative encounters between ghostlike visitors and inhabitants of heaven to examine choices involving pride, resentment, possessiveness, and repentance.

The book’s theological argument is presented through fiction rather than through a systematic sequence of proofs. Characters are given opportunities to change, but many resist because they prefer familiar grievances or desires to the demands of love and reality.

Readers sometimes mistake the setting for a conventional description of heaven and hell. Lewis instead uses a visionary framework to explore moral and spiritual ideas through conversation and symbolism.