It is Tuesday evening and London’s Mayfair area is bustling. It is also the second night of the dynamic Mount Street Neighbourhood Festival. Lasting from the 13th to the 18th of October of 2025, the festival features an array of events from morning to night and happens to coincide with other major art fairs like PAD and Frieze, happening in the heart of Mayfair. The festival’s events are all ticketed but free, so no one misses out. Visiting home in London for a few days meant I didn’t have access to my updated wardrobe, so instead I admired the festival’s stylish hosts and attendees with a keen eye, in my jumper and everyday jeans. This Tuesday evening, we are located at the Mayfair Library, a spot that an anonymous librarian describes as a ‘hidden gem of London’ that ‘not many people tend to know is here’. I was one of those people, positively surprised that such a flashy area of town had preserved a place as humble and integral as a library.

While the Fitzcarraldo Editions pop-up shop is down the road, filled with bookish individuals talking fiction and sipping complimentary champagne, it is 5 pm at the library and about seventy of us are guided up the stairs of the library and into an intimate and dimly lit room to socialise, just before a chuffed, red-cheeked man rings a bell to indicate the beginning of the main event in the next room. I take a seat and we are greeted by BAFTA and Laurence Olivier Award-winning actor Omari Douglas who leads the Book Club with Writer Cesca Echlin. The book we are celebrating tonight is James Baldwin’s Another Country, a work of fiction borne of isolation. Douglas describes:

“I first encountered this book just over a year ago…I read it in a moment of chaos and revisited it for this event. One of the reasons why I am drawn to this novel in particular is because he has this ability to articulate things that I quite often felt were not able to be articulated. It is characteristic for fiction to mirror the personal.”

Douglas shares that Baldwin “had a teacher who took him to the NY Public library and very quickly a library became a space of sanctuary for Baldwin so grateful for having you all in this space here”. It is only a fitting tribute, to Baldwin’s world of characters – fictional and non-fictional – that we have been invited to celebrate his writing in a space that houses and protects our most beloved works, and offers itself without a cost, just like this event.  

Douglas then kickstarts a performance consisting of enactments of some of the novel’s scenes and accompanied by a guitarist who – in addition to blessing the room with vocals that twist Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘All of Me’ – also acts as one of the five characters in the room. The audience is mesmerised by each performance. This is not just any book club event. The actors, in harmony with the vibrant yet violent essence of Baldwin’s novel, honoured it with pure passion and excitement. By portraying a community onstage, those involved helped create a community offstage. This event bridged the gap between stage performances and community events by appreciating fiction at the core.