A reserved English gentleman bets half his fortune that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and walks out of his club that same night with a carpet-bag, a French valet, and a detective already convinced he is a bank robber on the run. Verne runs them through steamers and sledges, a widow rescued from a funeral pyre, a Hong Kong opium den, a charging herd of buffalo and a bridge about to give way — always with the clock ticking and the timetable pinned to the page. It reads like the first great travel thriller: an ode to the shrinking Victorian world and the maddening, exhilarating tyranny of the schedule.