The Great Divorce

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis was published by HarperCollins Publishers in January 1998 and is our 11033rd best seller. The ISBN for The Great Divorce is 9780006280569.

C.S. Lewis’s dazzling allegory about heaven and hell and the chasm fixed between them, is one of his most brilliantly imaginative tales, as he takes issue with the ideas in William Blake’s ‘The Marriage between Heaven and Hell’.

In a dream, the narrator finds himself in the grey limbo of Hell, where the disgruntled and ghostly inhabitants take a bus-ride to the plains of Heaven, where they meet angels and the souls of those already in Heaven.

This striking fable portrays Hell as small and shrunken, less substantial than Heaven, which is bright and solid and the ultimate Reality. The occupants of Hell can never become part of Heaven, for their spiritual blindness prevents them from entering into its glorious reality. They prefer their own shrunken version of reality to the joy which could be theirs.