A Himalayan Love Story by Namita Gokhale — set in the hill towns of Uttarakhand and Himachal, this novel of two generations of women captures the rhythm of life in small Himalayan settlements better than most travel writing about them.
Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab by William Moorcroft and George Trebeck — a 19th-century account by a Hudson's Bay vet who became one of the first Europeans to ride through Kullu, Lahaul, Ladakh, and beyond. Slow but full of detail no later traveller could match.
Altai Himalaya by Nicholas Roerich — the painter who settled in Naggar wrote this as a record of his Central Asian and Himalayan expeditions. Eccentric, mystical, often beautiful — and tied directly to the Kullu valley.