# The Key

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/kathryn-hughes/the-key/9781472248879

![The Key](https://quivercdn.com/covers/headline-review/kathryn-hughes/the-key_978-14-7224-887-9.jpg?v=2026-05-16%2016%3A19%3A27)

- Book: [The Key](https://www.bookquiver.com/kathryn-hughes/the-key) ([The Key.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/kathryn-hughes/the-key.md))
- Authors: [Kathryn Hughes](https://www.bookquiver.com/kathryn-hughes)
- Publisher: headline_review
- Medium: audio
- ISBN: 978-14-7224-887-9
- Published: 2018-03-01
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Audiobook

## Description

'Riveting' Lesley Pearse on The Letter. 'Gripping' Good Housekeeping on The Secret. From Kathryn Hughes, the #1 bestselling author of The Letter and The Secret, comes a powerful, shocking, heartbreaking story set to get everyone talking in spring 2018. 1956 It's Ellen Crosby's first day at work as a student nurse at Fairhaven County Lunatic Asylum. When she meets Amy Sullivan, a young woman committed for allegedly attempting to drown herself and her stepsister, and Dr Stephen Lambourn, a pioneering physician keen to try out the various 'cures' available for mental illness, little does Ellen know that a choice she will make is to change all their lives irrevocably... Present day Under the cover of darkness, a young woman, Kate, picks her way through the brambles to the abandoned Fairhaven Asylum. A vast building with over six miles of corridors, the asylum still houses the metal-framed beds, rusty instruments and infamous padded cells used before it closed its doors for the last time. In an old wardrobe, Kate discovers a suitcase belonging to a female patient who was admitted to the asylum in 1956. The shocking contents of the suitcase lead Kate to unravel a forgotten story of tragedy, lost love and an old wrong that only Kate may have the power to put right.