Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography published by C. S. Lewis in 1955.

The work describes Lewis's life from very early childhood (born 1898) until his conversion to Christianity in 1931, but does not go beyond that date.

His aim was instead to identify and describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of and consequent search for the phenomenon he labeled "Joy", his best translation of the idea of (German) Sehnsucht.

Lewis recounts and remembers his early years with a measure of amusement sometimes mixed with pain.

The book's last two chapters cover the end of his search as he makes the leap from atheism to theism and then from theism to Christianity and, as a result, he realizes that Joy is like a "signpost" to those lost in the woods, pointing the way, and that its appearance is not as important "when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles.