Both a memoir, a historical journey and a scientific treatise, The Address Book explores the concept of home. It begins in Radford's old neighbourhood of Devonport in the 1950s.
"Back then, if you couldn't afford Mt Roskill, Glen Eden or even Takapuna, you went to Devonport," he recalls. "It was considered a decaying community of no great significance but nowadays it's turned into the Cannes or Nice of Auckland. I've always enjoyed going back there. It's one of the few places in the world where I know the insides of the houses as well as the outsides."
From there, the book takes in Radford's current southern England hometown of Hastings and the surrounding county of Sussex before eventually branching out into the far reaches of the universe. "Someone from The Times very nicely said that it defied genre," says Radford, regarded as one of the Guardian newspaper's most experienced journalists.
"I wasn't thinking of it like that. I was just writing a book that seemed to have a progression or a theme. It came from a sudden flash of remembering writing my name in a schoolbook in Devonport. I thought it was an interesting way to do a book, to move out from an address and see what you find on the way."
As its title suggests, The Address Book explores how people instinctively put down roots, a common practice that has radically changed over the centuries.
"Two thousand years ago nobody had an address," says Radford. "You'd say 'how can I find a friend in Syracuse?' and someone would reply 'he's down by the baker's'. Somehow it became a legal term. If you were a person of no fixed abode, you were therefore not to be trusted. I thought I was going to write a book about how you actually compose the idea of an address but it didn't turn out like that. It's more about a series of thoughts about the notion of identity and place."
According to the Sacred Heart College old boy, those ideas were not very strong in New Zealand when he was a teenager in the 1950s.
"It sounds a terrible thing to say, but it didn't feel like a real country," he says. "Devonport was really boring because nothing ever seemed to happen. We did all the things we were supposed to do but a lot of New Zealanders had an acute sense that we were missing all the action. Karl Stead once told me that he was writing a book called The End of the Universe at the End of the World and we both knew what we meant."
Fortunately, on his numerous trips back since, Radford has found that much has changed in the intervening years. "I'm not an exile in the sense that I've turned my back on the place," he says.
"If you're a journalist you tend to want to be in the middle of it all and Auckland is still not in the middle of it all. It's quite difficult to be that when geographically you're so far away from other centres of population."
Nevertheless, there were some significant historical milestones in 1957 when Radford joined the New Zealand Herald as a fresh-faced 16-year-old reporter. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik One, the very first satellite into Earth's orbit, in October of that year. Meanwhile, closer to home, Edmund Hillary set out to reach the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Atlantic Expedition, a feat he achieved in January 1958.
"You couldn't be a reporter and not be aware of science," says Radford. "And you would have to be dead inside not to be thrilled by the drama that was going on in space. So we followed it along with everyone else and you can't follow the space race without realising there's something inexorable about Newtonian physics, so you might as well learn a little about it."
Radford moved to England in 1961. "It was something everybody I knew did for a couple of years," he recalls.
"There weren't any problems about it because there was still a British Empire and we all had British passports, which continued until 1963. Back then you could still hear people born in New Zealand referring to England as 'home'. That sounded odd to me, as I was already aware that England wasn't home. But it was the place where everybody from the Empire went. It was actually already a Commonwealth but it had an imperial flavour to it.
"You were a citizen of the British Empire in the same sense that St Paul went around boasting that he was a Roman citizen. You felt you had the privilege of going wherever you liked. There were places around the world that were absolutely full of New Zealanders crashing around acting as if they owned it all, and I was one of them."
Having grown up on a steady diet of British and American novels, London seemed very familiar to the young Radford. "I've always been interested in the idea that your sense of where you are is shaped quite savagely by the books you read, the music you listen to or the films and plays that you've seen," he says. "I remember reading Moby Dick and wishing I was in New Bedford surrounded by people from the South Seas, as if I wasn't already surrounded by people from the South Seas. I just didn't recognise it at the time.
"After I'd been here for a while, I realised I'd always been here and that British culture wasn't so much imported but reflected in New Zealand. You couldn't study the 'great New Zealand novel' in 1957 because there wasn't one, or if there was, nobody had read it. Maybe there is one now but back then homegrown literature had no status. I knew of Alan Curnow but only as a contributor of a comic poem once a week to the Herald."
Radford joined the Guardian in 1973, where he worked until his retirement in 2005. During those 32 years, he edited the literary, arts and features section, and helped create the paper's influential science and computer pages in the 1980s.
"I ended up becoming part of the scientific community without ever having planned to," he says. "There were so many amazing things going on and I've been lucky to be a witness to several scientific revolutions including in computing, space, genetics and biology. I've always had an interest in geology and I don't think you can be a New Zealander and not be aware of geology.
"I arrived in England just in time for the Tectonic Revolution, which was exciting stuff as you found out that everything you knew about the world was wrong. As the space programme progressed to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, you suddenly realised you were actually learning about the Earth."
However, the later sections of The Address Book are just as influenced by science fiction authors like J.G. Ballard and Douglas Adams as by actual technological advances.
"I'd imagined that once I left behind terrestrial postcodes it would be a bit of a problem," admits Radford. "I thought I'd quite quickly be describing things in terms of discovery and science but, in fact, when you go as far as the solar system you suddenly realise there is quite a lot of literature about planets like Mars and Venus already in your head."
After visiting the revolutionary CERN laboratory in Switzerland, Radford was also reminded of earlier fantastical tales like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre, originally conjured up at nearby Lake Geneva.
"One is struck by all the imagining that has gone before that still has some validity somewhere in the palpable world around us," he says. "You become aware quite quickly of how much the things you can touch are affected by the things you thought you knew, that you remembered, dreamed about or romanticised from some fiction. You can't separate a place from your awareness of a place and that works very well if you're an exile."
The Address Book (4th Estate $44.99) is out now.
