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June's close connection to a murder becomes an obsession that leads her into an intimate and increasingly deceptive relationship with the dead woman's family, forcing her to confront her own marriage and past. A compelling story of violence, morality, and above all, the human being's unending desire for reinvention.

Twenty Questions

"With Twenty Questions, Alison Clement has accomplished that rare feat of a literary page-turner.  The prose is deceptively straightforward and the characters eerily ordinary and recognizable.  Beneath a simple surface runs a complex and frightening subterranean story, one that continues to produce surprises and insights, the most alarming of which might be that this is every person's psychology, every town's fraught underside.  This book satisfies at all levels."
—Oregon Book Award judge, Antonya Nelson

Winner of the Oregon Book Award
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

~Clement writes with ease and a sense of humor......a very satisfying read
—The Houston Chronicle

~spins outward to embrace the many complexities of an examined life.
—Calyx Journal, Dorothy Blackcrow Mack


~Twenty Questions was a Bookreporter staff pick for 2006