I'm re-reading Fr. Owen Francis Dudley's Masterful Monk series about the problem of human happiness. I just finished reading The Shadow on the Earth: A Tale of Tragedy and Triumph first published in 1945. It explores the meaning of pain and suffering. There are many non-fiction books on the subject, but fiction can often grip your mind and heart more powerfully than non-fiction.
The protagonist, in the flower of his youth, has an accident on a mountain in the Alps. He is carried, broken and bleeding, to a monastery where he is treated and pronounced permanently crippled from a serious spinal injury. How will he respond to the tragedy in his life? That is the conflict in the story.
