Ten-year-old Sadie Meadows is reading in bed on New Year's Eve when she finds a book called The World from Your Bedroom - There and Back Again, but when she opens it up and begins to read, she is a little disappointed to see it is nothing more than a travel book packed with pages detailing hundreds of places across the world. She reads the first page, then puts the book down just as sleep claims her at the instant that the New Year arrives. She awakes to find that, instead of being in her bedroom at home in Skipton, somehow she has been transported to Wexford in the Republic of Ireland, the location that she had just read about in the book. There follow a series of adventures, each set in a different location, as Sadie finds herself travelling across the globe as she attempts to get back home again. Her journeys this month take her to south-western Europe, North Africa and the extreme north of the North American landmasses.