19 bingeworthy books people finished in 24 hours
 We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us which book was SO GOOD that they finished it in less than 24 hours. Here are 19 soon-to-be faves.
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 Credit: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan Sometime around my 24th hour of labor, I asked my husband if he thought I was being punished.
"Does the universe not want this? Do you think I'm not supposed to be having a child?"
I promise you it made sense at the time. After a pregnancy marred by hyperemesis gravidarum (think morning sickness, but all day, for nine months), friends and acquaintances assured me I'd at least have a smooth delivery, that usually one had either a bad pregnancy or a bad birth — what are the odds I'd have both? But then I watched, step by step, as every part of my birth plan went wrong, until I found myself questioning everything as I waited to be taken into the OR for an emergency C-section, tubes in my arm and back and uterus, my baby's heart rate decreasing. I was depleted, delirious, flailing.
My fears were assuaged when my son was born healthy and placed in my arms. Of course I knew this was just the beginning of another hardship, but at least postpartum seemed familiar. It was grounded in realities I'd experienced: lack of sleep, being stuck at home, handling newborns. My husband was worried about the simple act of filling the hours with an infant, but I was confident. I'd helped take care of my baby brothers; I'd babysat for years. I believed I'd left the disorienting, supernatural fears behind me, with the counting of kicks and inscrutable sonograms and mysterious contractions. I was wrong.
Three of this year's best thrillers — Ashley Audrain's The Push, Julia Fine's The Upstairs House, and Kyra Wilder's Little Bandaged Days — find fertile ground in new motherhood. Using horror tropes — an evil child, a poltergeist, and a descent into madness — the authors expose and amplify the scariest parts of postpartum. By pushing these new mothers' alienation, doubt, shame, and paranoia to extremes, the authors are able to mimic the experience of that fear: desperate, irrational, and overwhelming. Reading them not even two years into motherhood, I couldn't help but recognize myself, and the fears at the core of every separate worry that plagued me: Is there something wrong with my baby? Is there something wrong with me?  Credit: Algonquin, Syreeta McFadden Kaitlyn Greenidge's highly anticipated second novel, Libertie, is a revelatory and enchanting piece of historical fiction, set in Reconstruction-era New York and centered on Libertie Sampson, the daughter of the first Black female doctor in New York. We sent Greenidge some questions via email about her inspiration, research, writing process, and more.
Libertie's mother is based on Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black female doctor in New York. When did you know you wanted to write about her (fictionalized) daughter, versus focusing on the doctor herself?
Kaitlyn Greenidge: I think, often times, if you talk about people who were a first or an only in a position — the first Black person or the first Black woman in a space — they can tell you about the pride of that accomplishment, but the emotional toll of it is harder to express. It's a self-protective measure, of course, but it's really hard for people who have gone through those experiences, often, to explain, emotionally, what it took. And that stoicism has a real emotional toll on their loved ones and people who they are close to. It seemed like I could talk about that more easily if Libertie was the narrator.
KG: I'm not the first to say this, but Reconstruction mirrors our own era so much, in that it was a moment where there was a flowering of Black achievement and Black gains — people who were only a few years out of slavery managed to do incredible things, against all odds. And it was also an era of intense white violence and anger towards any expression or existence of Blackness, across this country — the rise of racialized violence and white violence and white vigilantism.
KG: I think it is a weird way to segregate fiction. It doesn't make sense to me that a writer would limit themselves to only write about one time period. Now, if you want to talk about tropes of books set in the past to be able to avoid them, I'm really happy to have that conversation.
KG: I tend to read as far and wide as I can — scholars, then also looking for any personal accounts of the space or place and then also looking for cultural histories — what were the songs, plays, forms of entertainment, food, drink etc that people were doing. Whatever research goes into the novel has to go into service of the greater emotional story, though.
KG: I try not to be precious about writing or focus on having to have one thing or one space. As I write this to you, my daughter is stuffing graham crackers into my mouth with Sesame Street blaring in the background. If I needed a special place to write or complete silence or a certain time of day, I would never have written my first book, let alone my second. I think staying open to engaging with the world, ideas and sensations is more important than anything.
KG: Anthony So's Afterparties; Sarah Schulman's Let The Record Show; and Andrea Lee's Red Island House.
Read Kaitlyn Greenidge's essay "I Thought I Wanted To Be An Actor, But I Just Wanted To Find My Voice." Get your copy of Libertie here.  ⭐️ = a BuzzFeed Books favorite Monday, May 10
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