Apart From Love is the debut novel by a true multi-media artist who is a writer, poet, painter, sculptor, architect, software engineer, and teacher. Uvi Poznansky was born in Israel and now makes her home in Southern California.

Apart From Love is a fascinating account of a series of events told from two different points of view. Ben is the estranged son of Lenny, an aspiring writer who has recently married a young woman close the same age as Ben. Anita, the new wife, is a diamond in the rough who has had a difficult life and is not particularly well-educated. Ben left the family when his parents divorced ten years before the story begins and receives a letter from his father imploring him to come home. Lenny is ill and in the hospital, and Ben comes home and meets his young step-mother for the first time. The attraction between them is strong and troubling, but they try to hide those feelings from Lenny.

Lenny’s story is told from Ben’s and Anita’s interpretations. Both have been encouraged by Lenny to tape-record their thoughts, and neither of them realizes until later that Lenny is capturing those thoughts for a book he is writing. He has a huge collection of tapes dating back to Ben’s childhood, and each chapter of the book is supposed to come from those tapes. Ben and Anita record some of their most intimate thoughts, not realizing until it’s too late that Lenny is listening to them and putting them into writing. Is Lenny really writing a novel culled from the lives of his son and new wife or is he manipulating events so that life imitates art? That is never really clear, nor is Lenny’s rationale for hiding the fact that his ex-wife, a piano teacher and concert pianist (and Ben’s beloved mother), has been institutionalized with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Once you get to know these characters, they become compelling. There is an air of mystery about the book that runs from the beginning to the final pages, but that also draws the reader in and makes the book difficult to put down. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Apart From Love and recommend it. It is available from Amazon.com.