C. S. Lewis Audiobooks

The Search for God: Narnia's creator making the case for faith in plain English

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Who is C. S. Lewis?

Two careers ran in parallel inside Clive Staples Lewis, and only one of them is remembered. The Belfast boy who lost his mother at nine and fought in the trenches at nineteen became a medievalist of the first rank, holding a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years before taking the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. He was born in 1898.

It was not enough. A convinced atheist into his thirties, Lewis came back to Christianity in 1931 after a long night’s walk with J. R. R. Tolkien, and from then on he wrote for two audiences at once. The Chronicles of Narnia gave several generations their first wardrobe; The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, the latter assembled from wartime broadcasts, made him the most widely read Christian apologist of the century.

He died in 1963, on the same day as Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy, which is why the newspapers barely noticed.

C. S. Lewis in audiobooks

This is not Narnia. The Search for God gathers Lewis’s shorter prose pieces and essays, the ones where he takes a single hard question, turns it over in daylight and refuses to let anyone off with a comfortable answer. The Grand Miracle, God in the Dock and Is Theology Poetry? are among them.

Ralph Cosham narrates, in the dry, unhurried English voice that suits Lewis better than any amount of gravitas would. Three hours is all it runs, which makes it an ideal way in: no commitment, and the arguments are complete in themselves rather than building towards a thesis.

It has drawn a large and warm response from listeners here. Whether you share his convictions or argue with every page, he is worth the three hours. Have a listen below.