Broadway and West End star Sierra Boggess is in Australia for the first time performing her hits from shows including Phantom of the Opera and Little Mermaid, Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of When Michael Met Mina, reveals her love for The Babysitters Club and why the power of stories and diverse representation in Australian literature matters more than ever; Young American writer Brit Bennett has written a powerful novel of secrets, small towns and friendship; and in our book to film adaptation segment we compare Julian Barnes' 2011 Booker winning novel The Sense of an Ending with the film directed by Ritesh Batra.

American writer Paul Beatty in conversation with Michael Cathcart at the 2017 at the Sydney Writers Festival

A discussion from Sydney Writers' Festival about how writers create and inhabit fictional worlds, and how as readers, we escape into them, and also Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin chooses his Masterpiece, Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

Join us for the best of this week's Books and Arts.

Live at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

Widely regarded as Graham Greene's masterpiece, The Power and the Glory tells the story of the unnamed 'whisky priest’, on the run from the law in 1930s Mexico.

Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist Richard Ford tells the story of growing up as an only child with his parents in Arkansas and Mississippi; James Bond actor Roger Moore dies aged 89; and George Saunders, after six collections of acclaimed short stories, has published his first novel which has been received by critics with rapture.

Paul Capsis performs in Cabaret at Athenaeum in Melbourne, Australian author Margo Lanagan on her short story collection Singing My Sister Down and story arcs in fiction according to artificial intelligence.

Join us for the best of this week's Books and Arts.

We discover the art of leisure with writer Robert Dessaix, imagine the world of the artist Gwen John with author Goldie Goldbloom, and reassess the life of artist Martin Sharp with a new biography by Joyce Morgan.