Kuciuk is the story of a great love: the love of the heroine for the soft geometries and the exciting rythms of the Belly Dance.
It tells of the passions thriggered by the sensuous moves of her body, the wishes taht take fire when the beat of the darbouka and the vibrations of the oud become more intense, when every little gesture becomes a promise of pleasure.
The romance of Alexandra Schwartzbrod is also signed by the remembrance of a memorable night of love, which entered the literature: the one between Kuciuk and the French writer Gustave Flaubert (L'Education Orientale"), the night that Flaubert spent in a lost village of Sahara with the famous dancer.
The story starts in Cairo at the beginning of 1800, when Kuciuk was few more than a child, though her forms and her moves are those of a little woman.
Orphane of mother and with a vagabond father, the little one lives with the uncle Nabil (who is fond of her), a baker, and his wife (who is not fond her).
A friendship starts between the child and Zubayda, an ex bellydancer, who protects her. She feels her talent and starts to transmit to the girlchild the secrets of her Art. From that time the life of Kuciuk becomes a crescendo of adventures and passions, and also of difficulties - those of a woman who fights to keep her freedom and dignity in a world that can't accept her.
The writer gives back with involving immediateness a fascinous and lost world. Page after page all the sensuality of our heroine reverberates: the sweets and the cakes she prepares when girl, the desires she lights up in men and women, and above all the voluptuous dance in which she is mistress.

Alexandra Schwartzbrod, French, born in 1960, is a journalist specialized in the weapon industry, and specifically into aviation.
She has published articles upon the political-military power under President Mitterand, and an indiscrete portrait of Jean-Luc Lagardere, boss of the mechanic/aeronautic industry Matra and of the Editions Hachette.
She collaborates regularly with "Liberation".
Kuciuk is her first book.