Lucknow is one of the great literary cities of India, and the body of writing about it — in Urdu, Hindi, and English — is unusually deep. Read at least one before you come.
A Fatal Friendship — Rosie Llewellyn-Jones is the foremost living historian of Nawabi Lucknow — a British scholar who has worked the city's archives for forty years — and "A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow" is the best single-volume account of how the city rose and fell in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her writing is less literary than Dalrymple's but more authoritative on Lucknow specifically.
Several of her other books — "A Very Ingenious Man" on Claude Martin and his strange house at Constantia, and "The Last King in India" on Wajid Ali Shah — are equally rewarding for anyone serious about the city.
Lucknow Boy — Vinod Mehta — for decades editor of The Pioneer, The Sunday Observer, and finally Outlook magazine — grew up in 1950s and 1960s Lucknow and his 2011 memoir opens with a long and fond account of the city in the early decades after independence. Hazratganj, the convent schools, the Ganjing tradition, the slowly fading Nawabi half-world: Mehta describes all of it with a sharp, affectionate eye.
The political memoir that takes over the second half of the book is itself worth reading, but for Lucknow specifically the first hundred pages are gold.
The Last Mughal — Dalrymple's 2006 history of the 1857 Rebellion is centred on Delhi and the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, but the most riveting chapters cover the simultaneous siege of Lucknow and the destruction of the Nawabi city. Drawing on Persian and Urdu sources that had never been used by Anglophone historians, Dalrymple reconstructs the siege day by day from inside the Residency and from the rebel camp outside.
Read it before visiting the Residency; the ruins acquire meaning they otherwise lack. Pair it with Mirza Ghalib's letters, which Dalrymple quotes throughout, for the most vivid contemporary voice on the events.
Umrao Jaan Ada — Mirza Hadi Ruswa's 1899 novel is the foundational text on Nawabi Lucknow — the fictionalised confession of a courtesan named Umrao Jaan, dictated to the author in her old age, in the city's last years before the British annexation. The book is part lament for a lost world of poetry recitals and refined manners, part unflinching account of how that world treated the women at its centre.
It was twice made into Hindi films (1981 and 2006) that anyone who has spent time in India will have heard of. The English translation by Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini is the best entry point; the original Urdu rewards anyone with the patience.