Kelner's View

Great idea: an improvising trio takes off from the English pastoral tradition on tunes by Delius, Finzi and Vaughan Williams plus two originals.

The first-time novelist Téa Obreht's book The Tiger's Wife, a surreal, seductive meander through recent history in the Balkans, has turned the 25-year-old into the latest literary superstar after she was crowned the youngest winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction yesterday.

Turkey wants to help turn the war-ravaged Balkans into a region of cooperation with a joint future in the European Union and Nato, Turkish president said Today, as part of his country's increased involvement in the region where it has historic influence.

Montenegrin guitarist Miloš Karadaglic was a child prodigy who became a star of Yugoslavian TV and radio in his teens before studying at London's Royal Academy, where he received the Julian Bream Award from the celebrated guitar legend himself – a passing-on of the torch which bears its first fruit with this striking debut album.

Three first-time novelists tackling macabre subjects – the aftermath of conflict in the Balkans, a love affair in a mental institution, and the story of a hermaphrodite baby called Wayne – feature in this year's shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The European Union's ability to unite in pursuit of agreed foreign policy goals is often underrated in Britain, where failures are seized on and successes ignored or taken for granted. But the start this week in Brussels of the first face-to-face talks between Kosovo and Serbia is undoubtedly a triumph for EU "soft power". Neither side would normally wish to have anything to do with the other were it not for the EU's insistent diplomacy over the past few years. Quite simply, the shared desire of Serbs and Kosovar Albanians to join the European club overrides almost all other considerations – even those legendary Balkan hatreds.

Chris Cviic was a writer and broadcaster who became a leading expert on the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Born in Croatia, the son of a businessman, he settled in Britain in 1954. His career took him to the BBC World Service, to St Antony's College, Oxford, to Chatham House and finally to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which promotes foreign investment and economic reform in former communist countries.

In the middle of May this year, thousands of leather-clad bikers from across the Balkans gathered in the Croatian town of Slavonski Brod for a bash celebrating the unbridled joy that comes from tearing up the open road on a powerful two-wheeled hog.

Ismail Kadare is a novelist of the grand manner who sees himself in a line from Shakespeare and Dante, and a modernist fabulist who by allegory and metaphor has nimbly laid bare the ironies and idiocies of recent Balkan experience. His belief that the best jokes are the old ones – cruelty, jealousy, selfishness, intolerance – place him in a long line of European satirists. Because of where he comes from, satire may flip into tragedy. "Everywhere in the world events flow noisily, while their deep currents pull silently," he writes in his new novel, "but nowhere is this contrast so striking as in the Balkans."

Sometimes UK-based global acts get a rough deal because what's on your doorstep somehow isn't "exotic" enough for the world-music purists.

Moulettes are an oddity even among the diverse ranks of the new folk boom, with the constant presence of Ruth Skipper's bassoon giving their sound a little of the flavour of 1970s early-music chamber-folkies Gryphon.

Alan Furst has done this century what Eric Ambler and John le Carré did in the last. He has achieved a complete reinvention of the Second World War spy novel as a vehicle for deeper insights into the human character, especially as it come under the pressure of accelerating history. Spies of the Balkans is the latest of his page-turners about the coming threat of Nazism and German occupation in the regions of Europe that were neither immediately conquered like France or Poland, nor which held out like Britain. The impact of the war on the Iberian peninsular, or on those central European countries like Switzerland, Hungary and Romania which tried to stay aloof from the conflict, remains little-known.