The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk is the essential primer on the 19th-century rivalry between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia. The chapter on Stoddart and Connolly — the two British officers executed outside Bukhara's Ark — makes visiting that spot feel genuinely charged. Hopkirk is a storyteller first, and the book reads like a thriller.
Tamerlane by Justin Marozzi covers the life of Timur, the conqueror whose empire centred on Samarkand and whose influence reshaped Bukhara's architectural heritage. Marozzi writes as a traveller as well as a historian, weaving his own journey through Uzbekistan into the 14th-century narrative. Useful context for understanding why so much of what you see in Bukhara dates to the late 14th and 15th centuries.
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937) remains the finest travel book ever written about Central Asia and Persia. Byron's account of arriving in Bukhara by train — then under Soviet rule — is brief but sharp, and his eye for Islamic architecture is unmatched. His descriptions of buildings you will actually visit feel precise and fresh nearly a century later.
Bukhara: The Eastern Dome of Islam by Shirin Akiner is a specialist history but accessible enough for a general reader. It covers the city from its Sogdian origins through the Samanid golden age to the Soviet period and is particularly good on the architectural significance of the monuments most visitors rush past.