An impeccably punctual English gentleman bets half his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and sets off that very evening with his French valet and a carpetbag full of cash. Around the World in Eighty Days is Jules Verne’s most purely delightful novel — a race against the clock that has never stopped being thrilling.
Part of its genius is that the fantasy is real. Unlike Verne’s voyages to the moon or the ocean floor, Phileas Fogg’s journey uses only the actual trains and steamships of 1872 — the novel is a love letter to the newly shrunk world of the age of empire and engineering, when for the first time a person really could go around the earth in weeks. Steamer, railway, elephant, wind-sled: Fogg improvises across every obstacle with maddening calm while a detective, convinced he is a fleeing bank robber, dogs his heels.
And the ending turns on one of the most satisfying twists in fiction — a trick of the clock and the date line that Fogg, in his precision, has overlooked, and the reader with him. It is a masterpiece of construction disguised as a lark.
This edition gathers it among Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages. See our guide to where to start with Verne.
Read Extraordinary Voyages by Jules Verne →
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