Which C.S. Lewis book was published posthumously after his wife’s death and explores grief?

A Grief Observed was published posthumously after C.S. Lewis’s wife’s death and explores grief.

Lewis’s wife, the American writer Joy Davidman, died of cancer in 1960. Lewis wrote the short book that became A Grief Observed while struggling with bereavement, originally publishing it in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The work records anger, doubt, loneliness, and changing reflections on God.

The book was published under Lewis’s own name after his death in 1963. Its direct, unsettled tone differs from the formal apologetic style of Mere Christianity. Lewis does not present grief as a tidy sequence with a simple resolution; instead, he examines how mourning affects memory, faith, and the experience of the self.

The original pseudonym sometimes leads readers to overlook the book in bibliographies of Lewis’s works. It is also distinct from Surprised by Joy, which is an autobiography about his earlier spiritual development rather than a meditation on bereavement.