Around the World in Eighty Days

Phileas Fogg, an exact and unemotional English gentleman, bets his fellow members of the Reform Club twenty thousand pounds that he can travel around the world in eighty days, and leaves London that same evening with his new French servant, Passepartout. A detective named Fix follows them, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber. They cross India on an elephant, rescue a young widow, Aouda, from being burned on her husband's funeral pyre, sail through storms to Hong Kong and Yokohama, cross America by train under attack, and race across the Atlantic, burning their ship's woodwork for fuel.

Jules Verne published the novel in 1872, as railways, steamships and the new Suez Canal made such a journey possible, and in 1889 the American journalist Nellie Bly made the trip in seventy-two days. Its clever ending turns on a fact about time zones. This translation is by George Makepeace Towle. For Verne's travels by air, read Five Weeks in a Balloon.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) grew up in the port city of Nantes, watching ships leave for distant lands. Sent to Paris to study law, he wrote for the theatre instead, until the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863 and signed him for a series of 'extraordinary voyages' that lasted the rest of his life.

In more than sixty novels he took readers under the sea, to the Moon and around the world, mixing adventure with real science and geography. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days made him one of the most translated authors in history and inspired generations of scientists and explorers.