Which C.S. Lewis book presents a fictional bus journey from a gray town to Heaven?

The Great Divorce presents a fictional bus journey from a gray town to Heaven.

Lewis published the theological fantasy in 1945. Its unnamed narrator boards a bus in a bleak, joyless town and travels to a radiant land that resembles Heaven. The passengers encounter bright, solid inhabitants who urge them to abandon the habits and desires keeping them from joy.

The title alludes to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis reverses Blake’s emphasis. Lewis’s story explores the relationship between Heaven and Hell, freedom and self-deception, and the way people can cling to misery even when offered transformation.

The book is not a conventional travel narrative or a retelling of Christian doctrine in systematic form. It is an imaginative parable. The gray town is often mistaken for a literal map of Christian afterlife teaching, but Lewis presented the work as a fictional exploration rather than a complete theological account.