Great reading that provides a sense of the city, from the Traveler online Ultimate Travel Library.
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City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (1993)
Through captivating events and characters, Dalrymple deftly unpeels Delhi’s plenteous layers, past and present, in a quest to discover what makes the city tick. This brilliant travelogue effortlessly traverses time to intimately unveil the beating heart of Delhi.
Delhi: A Novel, by Khushwant Singh (1990)
Darting back and forth through some seven centuries of Delhi’s rocky history, this historical novel centers on the life of a lascivious journalist and is interwoven with a jumble of engaging characters, from princes to poets.
Inhaling The Mahatma, by Christopher Kremmer (2006)
From Old Delhi’s teeming streets to New Delhi’s corridors of power, Kremmer superbly captures modern India at a time of change. Through riots, a hijacking, and other close encounters, the author, aided by the grace of his adopted Indian family, finds resilience and optimism amid India’s chaos.
The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple (2007)
Largely shaped from the rebels’ formerly untranslated documents, this gripping book relays the Indian and British perspectives of the 1857 siege of Delhi—climax of the largest anti-colonial revolt in history that led to the demise of the highly cultivated world of Mughal Delhi.
Twilight in Delhi, by Ahmed Ali (1940)
Classic historical novel set in Delhi after the War of Independence (1857). Revolving around an upper-class Muslim family, it proffers a nostalgic window into the Islamic and Hindu culture of Delhi and how it, and Delhi at large, changed with British rule.
