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Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home
Not yet published
Expected 5 Mar 26'Poignant and charming... few books pull me along in a single sitting. I devoured this in one long train journey.' David Bodanis, bestselling author The Art of The Power of Decency In A World Turned Mean.
You don’t find home. Home finds you.
Roz has lived in her London house for thirty years. She arrived there bewildered and reckless, moving in with a man she'd known for one week, and the house kept Are you sure? Do you belong here? Now, decades later, it’s the keeper of her history, her work and her life with Dave. But now they’ve decided to leave the city.
With sharp wit and genuine curiosity, Roz explores the deep resonance of place and how a house is built on layers of happenstance, how it holds the ghosts of previous owners, and how we come to know it like our own limbs. From estate agents’ slippery tricks to the strange archaeology of attics, from the sounds that tell us we’re home to the leap of faith required to start again somewhere new, this is a book about stuff and nonsense, love and junk, the old kingdom and the new —and the ways our homes shape us as much as we shape them.
By turns hilarious and unexpectedly moving, Turn Right At The Rainbow is creative non‑fiction that reads like a novel. It’s for readers of memoir who crave heart as much as humour, as well as those who scroll property listings just for nosiness. Above all, it’s a quest for the miraculous moment when somewhere alien becomes ‘home’.
Roz Morris is an award-winning novelist whose work explores identity, imagination and the places that make us. She has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter, teaches masterclasses for The Guardian and has helped thousands of writers through her Nail Your Novel books
You don’t find home. Home finds you.
Roz has lived in her London house for thirty years. She arrived there bewildered and reckless, moving in with a man she'd known for one week, and the house kept Are you sure? Do you belong here? Now, decades later, it’s the keeper of her history, her work and her life with Dave. But now they’ve decided to leave the city.
With sharp wit and genuine curiosity, Roz explores the deep resonance of place and how a house is built on layers of happenstance, how it holds the ghosts of previous owners, and how we come to know it like our own limbs. From estate agents’ slippery tricks to the strange archaeology of attics, from the sounds that tell us we’re home to the leap of faith required to start again somewhere new, this is a book about stuff and nonsense, love and junk, the old kingdom and the new —and the ways our homes shape us as much as we shape them.
By turns hilarious and unexpectedly moving, Turn Right At The Rainbow is creative non‑fiction that reads like a novel. It’s for readers of memoir who crave heart as much as humour, as well as those who scroll property listings just for nosiness. Above all, it’s a quest for the miraculous moment when somewhere alien becomes ‘home’.
Roz Morris is an award-winning novelist whose work explores identity, imagination and the places that make us. She has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter, teaches masterclasses for The Guardian and has helped thousands of writers through her Nail Your Novel books
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
210 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication March 5, 2026
3 people are currently reading
5 people want to read
About the author
Roz Morris
26 books374 followersWhat do I read? Fiction that cares about characters AND plot. Although I'm a sucker for beautiful language, I like a story too, dammit. I'm a slow reader because I'm easily trapped by lovely sentences and ideas, and when I enjoy a book I'm reluctant to leave its world behind.
I live in London with my writer husband, and our house is mostly decorated with bookshelves - so much so that different rooms are devoted to different categories, like a shop. My study, where I'm writing this now, is the fiction room - and when I look up from my keyboard it's a pleasure to see the spines of novels that have been important to me.
I'm a journalist, ghostwriter, editor and writing coach, and I'm also coming out from behind the ghosting curtain with novels of my own.
I've got eight books in circulation (books that I can admit to, that is!) Four are about writing - the Nail Your Novel series. I also have three nailed novels. My Memories of a Future Life is a contemporary reincarnation story with a twist that asks as many questions as it answers. Lifeform Three is a science fiction fable in the tradition of Ray Bradbury. Ever Rest is an exploration of how we live after we lose the most important person in our world. And I have a book of true travel tales, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction.
Ever Rest will be published on 3 June 2021.
Sign up for my newsletter https://tinyurl.com/rozmorriswriter
I live in London with my writer husband, and our house is mostly decorated with bookshelves - so much so that different rooms are devoted to different categories, like a shop. My study, where I'm writing this now, is the fiction room - and when I look up from my keyboard it's a pleasure to see the spines of novels that have been important to me.
I'm a journalist, ghostwriter, editor and writing coach, and I'm also coming out from behind the ghosting curtain with novels of my own.
I've got eight books in circulation (books that I can admit to, that is!) Four are about writing - the Nail Your Novel series. I also have three nailed novels. My Memories of a Future Life is a contemporary reincarnation story with a twist that asks as many questions as it answers. Lifeform Three is a science fiction fable in the tradition of Ray Bradbury. Ever Rest is an exploration of how we live after we lose the most important person in our world. And I have a book of true travel tales, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction.
Ever Rest will be published on 3 June 2021.
Sign up for my newsletter https://tinyurl.com/rozmorriswriter
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Author
Roz Morris has a way of getting under your skin and, whilst this book might easily be mistaken at first glance for a jolly, perhaps even slightly superficial account of a London couple’s attempt to sell their house and buy another, don’t be fooled.
The author’s account of what became something of an ordeal, lasting many months (an ordeal known all too well by millions of British homeowners), is full of witty and intelligent insight into a process that follows arcane rules of camouflage and deception, orchestrated by perhaps the least trustworthy of professionals, the estate agents, motivated purely by the imperative to close the sale, whatever the potential cost – financially or emotionally – to the client.
But this storyline, full of the rush of hope followed, perhaps inevitably, by exasperation and disappointment, is really just the front door which opens onto a deeper and more meaningful exploration of what we mean by “home”. To say that we are moving house really doesn’t encapsulate the psychological or emotional wrench that relocation entails and it is here that Morris’ prose really sings as she plumbs the history and meaning of her abodes past, present and in the potential future.
I found myself smiling, chuckling and nodding along as she mined her memories from childhood, through her student days, on into adulthood as she found her roots and settled, finally, with her husband Dave (and a better suited creative couple it would be hard to imagine). But there were also passages that had me swallowing hard, with suddenly moist eyes, as with deft wordcraft she brought me face to face with feelings all too familiar of my own about places, people and things left behind that can never be revisited.
It is admirable that Morris has managed to reframe what would have been, to many, a nightmare journey of baffling frustration as a kind of adventure, in which the hero and heroine manage to rise above the game that everyone else is expecting them to play without demur. (And how apt, given that husband Dave is, in fact, a game designer.) I’m not at all sure that I would have emerged so apparently unscathed from a similar experience!
“Turn Right At The Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home” is an unexpected delight that can be read in one long sitting, if you are so inclined. But, as with the Slow Food movement, it greatly rewards the reader who takes the time to ingest it in small bites and chew properly to extract the most from its carefully composed ingredients. Highly recommended.
The author’s account of what became something of an ordeal, lasting many months (an ordeal known all too well by millions of British homeowners), is full of witty and intelligent insight into a process that follows arcane rules of camouflage and deception, orchestrated by perhaps the least trustworthy of professionals, the estate agents, motivated purely by the imperative to close the sale, whatever the potential cost – financially or emotionally – to the client.
But this storyline, full of the rush of hope followed, perhaps inevitably, by exasperation and disappointment, is really just the front door which opens onto a deeper and more meaningful exploration of what we mean by “home”. To say that we are moving house really doesn’t encapsulate the psychological or emotional wrench that relocation entails and it is here that Morris’ prose really sings as she plumbs the history and meaning of her abodes past, present and in the potential future.
I found myself smiling, chuckling and nodding along as she mined her memories from childhood, through her student days, on into adulthood as she found her roots and settled, finally, with her husband Dave (and a better suited creative couple it would be hard to imagine). But there were also passages that had me swallowing hard, with suddenly moist eyes, as with deft wordcraft she brought me face to face with feelings all too familiar of my own about places, people and things left behind that can never be revisited.
It is admirable that Morris has managed to reframe what would have been, to many, a nightmare journey of baffling frustration as a kind of adventure, in which the hero and heroine manage to rise above the game that everyone else is expecting them to play without demur. (And how apt, given that husband Dave is, in fact, a game designer.) I’m not at all sure that I would have emerged so apparently unscathed from a similar experience!
“Turn Right At The Rainbow: A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home” is an unexpected delight that can be read in one long sitting, if you are so inclined. But, as with the Slow Food movement, it greatly rewards the reader who takes the time to ingest it in small bites and chew properly to extract the most from its carefully composed ingredients. Highly recommended.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Having led a nomadic existence, and therefore having house hunted through through many countries, although not always to purchase, I read Roz Morris’s latest memoir out of curiosity, and because I know she is a writer able to capture emotion with sky-blue clarity.
Turn Right at the Rainbow is a book full of wit and wisdom, and all the time questioning the very meaning of ‘home’. Not only do we follow Roz and Dave on their search for somewhere new to call home, we are taken on a tour of her childhood, and how memories believed to be purely our own, are actually sometimes a mirror of someone else’s. Morris describes with beautiful lyricism the similarities of her 1970s childhood at Alderly Edge with that of novelist, Alan Garner, in the same place in the 1940s. She writes, “I am reading someone playing at being me, before I was born.” Morris’s description of the weathervane on the church steeple following not only her journey through childhood but that of Garner, and his father before him, reminded me of the hand game played as a child—here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and there are all the people.
The history and memories of the bricks and mortar of our homes become almost tangible, and something as buyers to which we feel we can add. “Old houses will suffer from persistent infirmities, bad previous surgeries, and bad previous exorcisms.” Or in the case of a new build, start from scratch while understanding the land on which this modern home now stands once also belonged to someone else. There is always a chain.
Touches of humour, along with despair at times at the machinations of the real estate industry, move the book through the rigmaroles of house buying, with always the pathos of what went before. Viewing Edge Croft, her childhood home, now demolished and with a modern edifice in its place, took me straight back to my childhood home in Malaysia—that site is now the Petronas Twin Towers.
That’s what Turn Right at the Rainbow does. It will take you back, make you question your own perception of home, wherever it was or is. This is a book to dip into time and again, a book to treasure.
Turn Right at the Rainbow is a book full of wit and wisdom, and all the time questioning the very meaning of ‘home’. Not only do we follow Roz and Dave on their search for somewhere new to call home, we are taken on a tour of her childhood, and how memories believed to be purely our own, are actually sometimes a mirror of someone else’s. Morris describes with beautiful lyricism the similarities of her 1970s childhood at Alderly Edge with that of novelist, Alan Garner, in the same place in the 1940s. She writes, “I am reading someone playing at being me, before I was born.” Morris’s description of the weathervane on the church steeple following not only her journey through childhood but that of Garner, and his father before him, reminded me of the hand game played as a child—here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and there are all the people.
The history and memories of the bricks and mortar of our homes become almost tangible, and something as buyers to which we feel we can add. “Old houses will suffer from persistent infirmities, bad previous surgeries, and bad previous exorcisms.” Or in the case of a new build, start from scratch while understanding the land on which this modern home now stands once also belonged to someone else. There is always a chain.
Touches of humour, along with despair at times at the machinations of the real estate industry, move the book through the rigmaroles of house buying, with always the pathos of what went before. Viewing Edge Croft, her childhood home, now demolished and with a modern edifice in its place, took me straight back to my childhood home in Malaysia—that site is now the Petronas Twin Towers.
That’s what Turn Right at the Rainbow does. It will take you back, make you question your own perception of home, wherever it was or is. This is a book to dip into time and again, a book to treasure.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Turn Right at the Rainbow is Roz Morris’s latest memoir, subtitled “A Diary of Househunting, Happenstance & Home”, and it’s an absolute joy to read. I volunteered to read an advance review copy, and I’m so glad I did!
Anyone who has ever looked for somewhere to live will smile and groan as the book leads you to places unexpectedly tender, funny and quietly profound. From the first chapter, Roz’s warmth and wit makes even the most chaotic house‑hunting misadventure feel like a moment worth savouring.
One of Roz’s many talents is her emotional precision: she captures the strange state of searching for a home – a mix of hope, despair, exhaustion, superstition and stubborn optimism – and combines it with wonderful observational details: small, throwaway moments that become the emotional architecture of the book.
There’s also a beautiful rhythm to the storytelling. Scenes unfold with a cinematic clarity, but the real magic is in the quiet beats that reveal just how much heart sits beneath the humour. Roz demonstrates perfectly that the search for a house is never just about bricks and mortar; it’s about identity, belonging and the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we hope to build.
This is a book for anyone who has ever chased a dream or stood in a doorway and wondered whether this might finally be “the one”.
Warm and witty, Turn Right at the Rainbow is a genuine pleasure to read.
Anyone who has ever looked for somewhere to live will smile and groan as the book leads you to places unexpectedly tender, funny and quietly profound. From the first chapter, Roz’s warmth and wit makes even the most chaotic house‑hunting misadventure feel like a moment worth savouring.
One of Roz’s many talents is her emotional precision: she captures the strange state of searching for a home – a mix of hope, despair, exhaustion, superstition and stubborn optimism – and combines it with wonderful observational details: small, throwaway moments that become the emotional architecture of the book.
There’s also a beautiful rhythm to the storytelling. Scenes unfold with a cinematic clarity, but the real magic is in the quiet beats that reveal just how much heart sits beneath the humour. Roz demonstrates perfectly that the search for a house is never just about bricks and mortar; it’s about identity, belonging and the stories we tell ourselves about the lives we hope to build.
This is a book for anyone who has ever chased a dream or stood in a doorway and wondered whether this might finally be “the one”.
Warm and witty, Turn Right at the Rainbow is a genuine pleasure to read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews