Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis’s honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: “Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

This is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898-1963) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Oxford. From 1955 to1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His conversion from atheism to Christianity in 1931 resulted in a flow of outstanding theological books, but it was The Chronicles of Narnia that he became best known for.