For now, I think of some of my favourite mountain books.

Into Thin Air tops the list. It is the true life story of what happens to climbers on Mount Everest in 1996. It’s written by journalist Jon Krakaeur, who was on the mountain that fateful year. He writes an incredible story that reads like a thriller.

Another favourite is Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer. It’s the fictionalised story of the mountain climber Mallory. I also love the atmospheric and very eventful Nanda Devi Affair by Bill Aitken.

Later that day, I set out a table for eight. There are momos from the café next door, and I put them to steam. And slice a loaf of multi grained bread from the local bakery, slathering it with butter and minced garlic.

Soon after, my guests start to arrive. There’s a jug of lemonade and locally brewed rhododendron wine on offer and people mill around helping themselves. We make a motley group - a Wall Street banker turned photographer, an animal rights advocate, a chef, a Dutch writer, an English school teacher, and two civil servants.

We are discussing Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden. This book is set in colonial India. It tells the story of single mother Sophie, who takes her two children into the Kashmir Valley and tries to make a life for herself. She loves the landscape and is forever paying more than she can afford for beautiful carpets and art. And she romanticises the locals and is hopelessly ignorant of the dark undercurrents of caste, religion and rivalry, something that will have ominous consequences for her family.

We talk about another of Godden’s books – the brooding Black Narcissus set in a convent in Darjeeling and made into a movie as well – another fantastic read.

After lunch, we return to Jawaharlal Nehru’s musing on the mystique of men and mountains.

Why is it always men and the mountains, what about the women? asks the English school teacher.

We think about books by women mountaineers – there’s Kulu by Penelope Chetwode. It’s a sort of cultural travelogue, as we follow the middle aged Penelope retracing the colonial India of her childhood, journeying in independent India from Shimla to Rohtang pass. For me the best part, was the authors expertise in natural history and local architecture, something that made her observations and reflections erudite and informative.

I tell the group about a book a student of mine said changed his life. Born Again on the Mountain tells the story of a young girl who was thrown off a train by robbers and lost a leg, but still went on to climb Mount Everest.

By this time, lunch is done. Over cups of steaming ginger tea, we reminisce about a book we read earlier – The Snow Leopard by Peter Mathieson. Here, the author, his friend and their sherpas, journey to the remote Crystal Mountain to study the mating of the blue sheep, before winter sets in and the mountain passes close up. The author lost his wife the year before and he struggles for meaning, finding consolation in the landscape around him and in his search for the elusive snow leopard. It’s the kind of book you want to go slow over, with prose thats poetic and poignant.

So what do we read next month?

Someone suggests Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane. It’s his first book, the one that made him famous, he talks about the way writers of mountain books portray the mountains in a way that is both enticing and unreal, and on the fear, risk, and the dangerous beauty of ice and snow. But it’s slow, very academic.

Let’s read The Eiger Sanction says the writer. It’s got everything you could possibly want from a mountain book – action, drama, and a murderer who is part of the expedition that is climbing the very dangerous face of the Eiger mountain in the Alps.

So murder it is.

Moving closer home to another mountain murder, I talk to Udayan Mukherjee, author of A Death in the Himalayas who tells me why a Himalayan village is the perfect venue for a murder story. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Tell us about your childhood reading?

I grew up in a very modest, middle class home and while there weren't a lot of indulgences available to us, there were always books. This was in Calcutta, where everyone seemed to read a lot of books. Later, when I moved to Bombay, I realised that it wasn't obvious that children would grow up reading books. Some cities seem to foster it, more than others. My elder brother was a voracious reader and the shelves at home were always full. The problem was that the books were often a bit ahead of my time - a lot of Sartre, Gide, Joyce, Beauvoir, hardly school boy stuff. Often there was deviousness involved. Once my parents, or a neighbour consulted my brother about the choice of a book for my 14th birthday. When I unwrapped my gift, it was The Plague by Albert Camus. I was in Class 8!

What was your inspiration for A Death in the Himalayas?

A Himalayan village is such an atypical social milieu that placing a murder story there was an enticing prospect. As it is always the tension arising from a clash of conflicting social groups and motivations that breeds crime. Visitors to the Himalayas are often deceived by the surrounding natural beauty in believing these are gentle, benevolent, inviting settlements, often forgetting that these also happen to very typical North Indian villages with all their smallnesses, bigotries and divisions.

What was your writing routine for this book?

In the mountains I tend to wake up with the sun. It's the light, and birdsong. So, a couple of hours before breakfast and a couple more between breakfast and lunch. Sometimes in the afternoon too, if it is going well. Other than fixing meals, there isn't a whole lot to do in the hills. Zero distractions. There are the long walks of course, which too are a huge help to the writing process.

I am new to this business of writing fiction, having started at the age of 45, well after I quit my day job in business television. I enjoy writing and it is also immersive, so when I am writing, I pretty much do it all the time.

You’ve spoken about how you enjoy looking out of a window while you write - could you describe your window view from your Uttarakhand home?

Oh, the view outside my window in Sonapani, Uttarakhand is a joy to behold! In spring, autumn and winter you see snowclad peaks stretching from the Chaukhamba over Ranikhet to Trishul, Nanda Devi and all the way to the Panchachuli range. Below these grand old peaks, lie valleys green with oak and pine. If I turn my gaze to the left or right I see forests of rhododendron and oak, with just the odd house in the neighbourhood. Blue skies, birds of all kinds, wild flowers in season; there is no better place to sit and write.

You now live in London, do you see yourself returning to the Himalayas?

I loved being in the Himalayas and we continue to have a lovely home there. But after two years of Covid, the isolation began to get to me. I cannot explain this. It is not as if you cannot build communities or social networks in the hills, many do. Yet, sometimes it can end up becoming an incestuous pit. The same people all the time, and after a while the warts start to show up. I will always love the Himalayas and will return to spend time there, it is a special connection. But would I live there full time? I don't know. And even if I don't, I will always look back on the years there with great fondness. That is how I see my life anyway - as a series of short journeys. Nothing needs to last forever, as long as you cherished it while it lasted. In the end, what is it all but a collection of years, and memories?

You have returned to television anchoring? What has the experience been like?

No, I have not returned to television anchoring, though the communication may have been positioned like that. After Covid, I felt the need for a change of scene for a while and when a TV channel offered the option of doing something small - a weekend show, a monthly column - based out of London, I agreed. It was London, not the work, that clinched it. To be frank, I have lost my taste for the TV stuff, it holds no charm for me. So, I enjoyed my time in London but will not continue with the television stuff, for which this is the last month. Besides, as I said, it wasn't a grand 'return to the studios' or anything like that, just an occassional flutter. My TV career is well and truly behind me, it served a purpose but is now water under the bridge.

What are some of your favourite books?

More than these writers with towering reputations it is individual books that I am drawn to these days. Recently I read short stories by Edith Pearlman and was blown away. And to think that I hadn't even heard of her before. Am reading stories by Lydia Davis and she is astonishing. Claire Keegan's Foster is easily one of the best books I have ever read. But the writer who I don't think got his due from the 'literary' fraternity is John Le Carre. He is hugely popular but the spy-writer tag thwarted his admission into the literary echelon he truly belongs to. In my book, A Perfect Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy are both worthy of the Booker prize. Le Carre is the master.

Among the crime writers I admire are PD James, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, Henning Mankell. But then, crime is a very large and diverse genre, and this isn't an exhaustive list. For example, Peter Hoeg isn't a crime writer but Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow can be read as a crime novel, and is just superb.

Your latest novel is a different genre and set in Kolkata, yet this shares a theme with your crime novel?

Yes, the abyss of human evil that Neville refers to in A Death in the Himalayas is indeed the subject matter of my latest novel No Way In. In a way, it is a deeply political book tracing its roots back to the spectre of communal violence that has become almost commonplace in today's India. But it also scrutinises the same divisions and fault lines existing inside the walls of a home. In a sense, the same fires rage inside and outside, in the society we live in. It possesses elements of a crime novel in its plot structure, especially in how the past returns to haunt the lives of the protagonists and how they must find a way to deal with it. It is dark, laced with violence.

And lastly, what books do you have in your to-read pile?

I am just finishing The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald. Alongside, I am reading the Swedish author Stig Dagerman's A Moth to a Flame which is a dark book. I have been dipping into A Manner of Being, which is a collection of essays by prominent writers on their mentors, where there is a delightful tribute to Tobias Wolff by George Saunders. Have also been eyeing the copy of Do Not Say We have Nothing by Madeleine Thien on my bookshelf. So much to read, so much to look forward to.

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That’s all the mountain reading for this week- trip fiction titles for real life and virtual journeys into the mountains. What are some of your favourite mountain books? I’d love to hear, do write in with recommendations.

Until next week, happy reading.

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com