Reviews
“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
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. Recommended by Crystal, Powell’s City of Books
“Twenty Questions peels away the facade of a happy marriage and shows the utter wasteland beneath the lies…Such is the power of Clement’s storytelling.”- The Oregonian.
“Clement’s subtle prose renders June’s existential pondering and anxious thoughts convincingly and the novel’s plot elements click…A fine debut.” – Publishers Weekly
“Touching, funny…Twenty Questions passes the test with an A.” – BookPage
Alison Clement 