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Additional Reading
The following are works set in the Himalayan region. I would recommend these for students grades 10 and up. Enjoy!
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The Road to Samarcand (1954) by Patrick O'Brian (author of Master and Commander) chronicles the journey of an orphaned teenager that begins in the South China Sea and leads to encounters with Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan cultures. |
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Winner of the 2002 Pacific Northwest Book Award, Himalayan Dhaba by Craig Joseph Danner tells the story of widowed doctor Mary Davis, who travels to the north Indian village where her deceased spouse worked as a volunteer. The author based this book on his own experiences as a doctor in the Himalayas. |
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The Inheritance of Loss (2006) by Kiran Desai takes place in Kalimpong, a village at the base of the Himalayas where Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet, and India meet. Sai, an orphaned teen, comes to live in an isolated home with her grandfather and his cook. Set in the mid-1980's, at the beginning of the Nepalese insurgency for an independent state, things become difficult when Sai becomes romantically involved with her Nepalese tutor. |
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Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton is the origin of our concept of Shangri-La. In this story, a group of travelers survive an airplane crash in Tibet and find refuge at a mysterious lamasery. |
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Beijing journalist Xinran based her novel Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet (2004) on a brief interview held with an elderly Chinese woman named Shu Wen. In this fictionalized account, Shu Wen heads to Tibet after the disappearance of her husband, a doctor in the People's Liberation Army. |
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Jeff Long's novel The Ascent (1992) is set on the remote Tibetan side of Mount Everest. Long, an experienced climber, describes the hardships of the ascent as two members of the climbing expedition come to terms with a climbing disaster in Wyoming that occurred 18 years earlier. |
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Winner of the San Diego Book Award, Falling to Heaven (2010) by Jeanne Peterson tells the story of a Quaker couple who cross the Himalayas into Tibet in 1954 and befriend a Tibetan family. Their quiet life is interrupted by Maoist soldiers, who take the husband, Gerald, captive. |
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