SARAEVO — Nera Daskal, one of the Balkans’ best-known novelists, will publish her first book in six years on pages designed to break down in industrial composting. The announcement on Tuesday drew a crowd to the Sarajevo Book Forum, where Daskal revealed that her son, Felix Sandberg, helped develop the material in a laboratory rather than a print shop.
The first run of “The Orchard of Glass” will comprise 18,000 copies, priced at 46 convertible marks (about €23.50). Daskal, 54, said the book’s paper-like sheets would feel familiar in the hand but avoid conventional plastic coatings. “I wanted the physical book to leave less behind than the story does,” she said.
A family project in print
Daskal has sold an estimated 3.8 million books in 11 languages, with readers drawn to her tightly observed stories of families in post-war Balkan towns. She has rarely spoken about her family in public. At the launch, she said Sandberg’s research started after he noticed that piles of damaged books from her home library were difficult to recycle because of their glossy covers.
Sandberg, 29, said the pair began trading notes over Sunday lunches in Skopje, where he was testing ways to bind plant fibres with a degradable coating. Tiny water droplets, forced under pressure into a starch-and-cellulose mixture, helped the researchers form a thin, flexible film without the solvent used in earlier trials. “My mother kept asking what happened to the material after the last page,” he said.
The work was carried out at the fictional Adriatic Materials Institute, whose test report says the sheets lost more than 90% of their mass after 90 days in an industrial composting chamber kept at 58°C (136°F). That is not a promise that a book will disappear in a garden compost bin: the institute says the coating needs controlled heat and moisture, and the pages should not be placed in ordinary paper recycling.
What the pages can—and cannot—do
Vega Purwanti, a packaging researcher who reviewed the test results for the institute, said the process was promising but still needed examination at larger scale. “A laboratory sample is not a supply chain,” she said, noting that the publisher must check consistency across thousands of sheets and explain disposal clearly. The new material costs about 22% more than coated paper, according to the publisher.
For Daskal, the launch has also become a family portrait. She said she spent years saving worn-out books from her late father’s small bookshop, then watched Sandberg turn that frustration into experiments. The twist, she added, was that he had not set out to make a book material at all: his first goal was a compostable label for jars used by a local food cooperative.
Livijus J. Jelena, publishing director at fictional North Bridge Editions, said the company would collect reader feedback before deciding whether to use the sheets for future titles. Each copy will carry a simple disposal guide, and the publisher will publish the test report online. Daskal said she would not call the novel “green” until the full print run had been assessed.
The book’s plot follows a family that inherits a failing orchard and argues over whether to preserve it or sell the land. Daskal said she began writing it before her son’s experiments, and that the material’s limitations suited a story about what people choose to keep. “A book is not weightless just because it is made of words,” she said.
