Which C.S. Lewis book presents a series of conversations about heaven, hell, and human choice?

C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce presents a series of conversations about heaven, hell, and human choice.

The book was published in 1945 and is structured as a dream or imaginative journey. A narrator travels from a bleak, ghostly version of hell to the outskirts of heaven, where visitors meet bright spirits who urge them to give up the habits and desires that keep them separated from joy. Lewis uses allegory, dialogue, and vivid images rather than writing a systematic account of Christian doctrine.

The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but Lewis argues against Blake’s idea that the two can be reconciled. The “divorce” in Lewis’s title refers to the separation between heaven and hell. The work is sometimes mistaken for a straightforward description of the afterlife; its dream framework signals that it is a theological and literary thought experiment.