Isabelle Eberhardt"s life was one of the most extraordinary of any writer"s of the last 150 years. Daughter of a Russian Nihilist who forbade her any contact with society, dressed her as a man, and insisted that her education consist of hard physical labor, she, perhaps unsurprisingly, ran away to North Africa in 1897, aged 20. There she traveled through the Sahara and became one of the first white women ever to be initiated into Sufism. She also produced a small but exceptional body of writing. The Oblivion Seekers is a selection of her best stories and vignettes of African life.