Which C.S. Lewis book is framed as a travel account through a strange afterlife?

The Great Divorce is framed as a travel account through a strange afterlife.

C.S. Lewis published the book in 1945. Its narrator takes a bus from a gray, shadowy town to a brighter country that represents heaven. The passengers confront guides and inhabitants whose choices reveal how pride, resentment, possessiveness, and self-deception can keep people from accepting joy.

The book is not a conventional map of heaven and hell. Lewis presents it as an imaginative theological tale, using conversations and symbolic encounters rather than a systematic description of the afterlife. The title alludes to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and emphasizes Lewis’s contrast between incompatible moral directions.

The narrative explores free will and the possibility that people may cling to misery because it protects their preferred identities or desires. Several passengers are offered transformation but resist it.

The Great Divorce is sometimes confused with Dante’s Divine Comedy because both use journeys through the afterlife. Lewis’s book is much shorter, modern in setting, and deliberately presented as a dreamlike vision.