Bhutan

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan, by Jamie Zeppa (2000). Zeppa leaves Canada to teach for two years in the Himalayas, and what she discovers is very different from her small-town life. "You walk through a forest and come out in a village, and there's no difference, no division. You aren't in nature one minute and in civilization the next," she says of her new home. Her memoir details her clumsy attempts to fit into a Buddhist culture and culminates in her falling in love with Bhutan and one young man in particular.

Buttertea at Sunrise: A Year in the Bhutan Himalaya, by Britta Das (2007). "Time has made this sanctuary one with the mountains," Das says of a Bhutanese chorten, a Buddhist stone monument. "Tall grasses and mosses have covered the flat roof in patches of green, and the once whitewashed stones have returned to their original yellow and brown." Close observations spark this memoir of a year spent working as a physiotherapist in the remote village of Mangar—a mission that evolves into a personal quest of self-discovery.

Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon: A Journey Through Bhutan, by Katie Hickman (1987). "Bhutan is a country that every traveller dreams of: a tiny mountaintop kingdom, the great buttresses of the Himalayas surrounding it like a fortress," Hickman writes. With photographer Tom Owen Edmunds, she explores unknown eastern Bhutan, encountering abbots, the mountain-dwelling Bragpa people, and a reincarnation of the Buddha.