Seven Years

From the Booker International Prize finalist and “one of Europe’s most exciting writers” (New York Times Book Review), a stark, unsettling novel of compulsion, marriage, and the strange hypocrisies of desire.

Alex has built an enviable life. His wife Sonia is everything a man could want: beautiful, ambitious, and highly cultured, she cofounded their successful architecture firm and shares his drive for success. But when he starts feeling the seven-year itch, Alex sets in motion a clandestine, humiliating affair with Ivona—an awkward, plain, passive woman whom he finds entirely unappealing, yet cannot bring himself to leave.

At the crossroads of his highbrow marriage and his inexplicable extramarital obsession, Alex’s double life collapses when Ivona becomes pregnant, forcing him to confront the dark, inconvenient realities of his own heart.

Translated by Michael Hofmann, Seven Years is Peter Stamm at his most masterfully unsparing—a sobering, hypnotic dissection of intimacy, ego, and the illusions of desire.