Twenty Questions
Alison
Clement
June's close
connection to a murder in her town becomes an obsession
that leads her into an intimate and increasingly deceptive
relationship with the dead woman's child and brother,
forcing her to confront her own marriage and past.
Nominated for the Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for
the Novel, Alison Clement's Twenty
Questions is a compelling
story of violence, morality, and above all, the human
being's unending desire for reinvention.
Twenty Questions has
won The Oregon Book
Award
Judge Antonya Nelson described Clement’s work as
“deceptively straightforward” with “characters eerily
ordinary and recognizable.”
buy it now in
paperback
~Clement's subtle prose renders June's existential
pondering and anxious thoughts convincingly, and the
novel's intriguing plot elements click.
—Publishers Weekly
~There is an insidious thread of dread that runs through
Clement's subtly malevolent yet intensely empathetic
portrait of desperate lives spun out of control by fear and
remorse.
—Booklist, Carol Haggas
~a
master of plot surprises
—
School Library Journal
~wrestles eloquently with some meaty issues: lies,
responsibility, chance.
—Kirkus Review
~Suffused with an awareness about the struggles of the
working poor, the novel offers a sometimes sad yet finally
gratifying glimpse into one woman's awakening about death,
fate, life, and love. For all public libraries.
—Library Journal, Maureen Neville
~passes the test with an A
—BookPage
~peels
away the facade of a happy marriage and shows the utter
wasteland beneath the lies
—The Oregonian, Alice Evans
~No question about it, Clement has shown herself again as a
novelist worthy of our attention
—Denver
Post,
James Hoggard
~Twenty
Questions was a Bookreporter staff pick for 2006