The Oblivion Seekers

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 her education include hard physical labor, she, unsurprisingly, ran away to North Africa in 1897. There she traveled through the Sahara and was initiated into Sufism, a rarity for white women. She produced a small but exceptional body of writing. This is a selection of her best stories and vignettes of African life, including several excerpts from her unfinished work.