Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer — the Austrian mountaineer's account of his wartime escape from a British internment camp in India and his arrival in Lhasa in 1946, where he became tutor to the teenage 14th Dalai Lama. The picture of Lhasa in the last years before the Chinese arrival is the closest we have to a window on that vanished city.
Lhasa: Streets with Memories by Robert Barnett — a short, brilliant essay on the city's recent transformation, written by one of the leading historians of modern Tibet. Reads the streets themselves as evidence of what has been built, demolished, and renamed.
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer — a sympathetic portrait that doubles as a meditation on exile, modern Tibet, and the relationship between the religious and the political.
My Land and My People by the Dalai Lama — the 14th Dalai Lama's own memoir, written in the early 1960s, covering his childhood in Amdo, his accession in Lhasa, the 1959 flight, and his first years of exile.
Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French — a sceptical, intelligent travelogue and history, willing to question the romance and the politics of Tibet from both sides. The best single book on what modern Tibet is actually like.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen — not Lhasa, but the great American account of a 1973 trek through the Tibetan-Buddhist landscape of inner Dolpo in Nepal, in search of the elusive cat. Indispensable reading for anyone heading onto the plateau.