The Radiant Way is the first of three linked novels (the others being A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory) which together, unusually for Margaret Drabble, cover the whole decade of the 1980s and incorporate extensive time lapses in their unfolding - unlike the tight time-schemes of the early novels.

Although the narrator calls her narrative ‘this non-story’ (RW 301), in fact there are far more dramatic plot events in The Radiant Way than in The Middle Ground. The central characters are Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and Esther Breuer, who met as undergraduates at Cambridge: the main focus is on Liz and Alix, while Esther, an art historian of solitary and eccentric private life, is less fully developed, and indeed the character of Liz's sister Shirley is at least as well established as Esther's. Expanding outward from this nucleus is a vast range of characters, almost all of a comfortable middle-class status, and including a number of people active in the media, not only because of the trio's Cambridge friends who have gone into theatre and television, but because Liz's husband Charles is a television producer. This is a novel which exploits its huge cast of characters to point to coincidences and links, as seen in The Realms of Gold and The Ice Age, sometimes ironically, sometimes with more serious intent.

The sense of connections between different strands of life, emphasized in earlier novels, is particularly felt by Alix, who works, as many women do, at insecure, underpaid part-time jobs in education and administration. As she travels across the suburbs of London, she reflects upon the multiplicity of human lives lived cheek by jowl across the city and across the country, much as Kate Armstrong had recognized the intricate proximity of lives packed together in her part of London: