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.”

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~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