Around the World in Eighty Days

Phileas Fogg, a wealthy, exactly methodical English gentleman who lives by the clock at his London club, wagers twenty thousand pounds, half his fortune, that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and sets off that same evening with Passepartout, his newly hired French valet, in tow. A Scotland Yard detective named Fix, convinced Fogg is the culprit behind a recent bank robbery, trails the pair across the journey hoping to arrest him the moment a warrant catches up, and very nearly derails the whole wager through his interference. In India, Fogg rescues Aouda, a young widow about to be forced onto her husband's funeral pyre, and brings her along for the rest of the trip, an act of plain decency that turns into genuine affection by journey's end. Believing he has arrived back in London five minutes past his deadline, Fogg thinks himself ruined and the wager lost, until Passepartout realizes what neither of them had accounted for, that traveling constantly eastward gains a full day against the sun, so that Fogg's own count of the days ran one behind London's the entire time. He arrives with the wager intact after all, wins his bet, and marries Aouda.

Verne times the whole adventure to three real technological breakthroughs completed only in 1869 and 1870, the American transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and India's own new rail lines, without which Fogg's itinerary would have been impossible a decade earlier. The novel unfolds with the ticking, itinerary driven suspense of a countdown rather than a traditional adventure plot, and it moves briskly enough that the pages practically turn themselves.

Some readers following the original serial believed the journey was actually taking place in real time, and shipping and railway companies lobbied Verne to write their own lines into the story.