Peter Stamm is the author of several novels, most recently  Seven Years, which tells of Alex, a handsome architect with a beautiful and talented wife, Sonia, who shares his occupation and good looks. Despite the appearance of an attractive life, Alex is drawn passionately and inexorably back to Ivona, a dull, plain Polish girl who works in a Catholic bookshop. When Ivona becomes pregnant, Alex’s two worlds collide in unexpected ways. Here Peter Stamm speaks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about imagining his characters as buildings, why he wants to have a room full of ugly objects and whether he believes that people – in his fiction and in life – can change.