Twenty Questions
Book Details
Author(s)Alison Clement
Publisher13th Street Press
ISBN / ASINB005H3MZI0
ISBN-13978B005H3MZI4
MarketplaceCanada 🇨🇦
Description
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 child and brother, forcing her to confront painful truths about her own life.
Winner of 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 desire for reinvention.
Recommended by Crystal, Powells Books
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
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.
Winner of 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 desire for reinvention.
Recommended by Crystal, Powells Books
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
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.
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