Which C.S. Lewis book presents a bus journey from a grey town to the outskirts of Heaven?

The Great Divorce presents a bus journey from a grey town to the outskirts of Heaven.

C.S. Lewis published The Great Divorce in 1945. The short theological fantasy follows a narrator who boards a bus in a bleak, insubstantial “grey town” and travels toward a radiant country understood as Heaven. The passengers meet bright spirits who invite them to surrender the habits, desires, and self-deceptions that keep them from joy.

The book is not a conventional account of Christian doctrine and is not intended as a literal map of the afterlife. Lewis uses imaginative dialogue, symbolism, and paradox to explore freedom, repentance, pride, and the consequences of refusing grace. Its title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, while reversing the direction of Blake’s famous phrase.

The grey town is sometimes confused with Hell in a simple geographic sense, but Lewis presents it as a condition of spiritual isolation and continual self-enclosure. The work is separate from The Chronicles of Narnia and from Lewis’s space-travel novels.