Around the World in Eighty Days

by Jules Verne

In London, the precise Phileas Fogg bets his Reform Club friends £20,000 that he can circle the globe in eighty days. He leaves with his new valet, Passepartout. Detective Fix, sure Fogg robbed the Bank of England, trails them. In India they rescue Aouda from a funeral pyre. After storms, a train attack and a ship burned for fuel, Fix arrests Fogg in Liverpool. Fogg reaches London convinced he has lost. Then he learns he gained a day traveling east. He sprints to the club, wins, and marries Aouda.

• Fogg wins the bet by miscounting. Fogg believes he is a day late, then learns that traveling east gained him a day. He makes the Reform Club deadline because he lost track of the calendar, not the clock.
• Fogg buys a ship, then burns it. Short on fuel crossing the Atlantic, Fogg buys the steamer Henrietta. Then he has the crew tear out its wooden parts and feed them to the furnace. Expensive, but it works.
• The detective chases the wrong man. Fix follows Fogg around the planet certain he is the Bank of England thief. He is not. The actual thief turns up in Edinburgh, which Fix learns far too late.

• “He crosses the world in a hot air balloon.” Up, up, nope. There is no balloon in Verne's book. Fogg uses steamers, trains, a sledge and an elephant. The balloon belongs to the 1956 film adaptation, which added it for spectacle.
• “Fogg does the trip because he is in love.” Romance? Not yet. Fogg goes because of a £20,000 wager with fellow Reform Club members. Aouda only enters the story in India, and he marries her after the bet is settled.
• “Passepartout is his rich old best friend.” Friend? Hardly. Passepartout is Fogg's valet, hired the very day the trip begins after the previous servant got the shaving water wrong. Fogg is a boss first, pal later.

• If they say: “Fogg never gets in trouble with the law, right?”
  You say: “He does. Fix finally arrests him in Liverpool, in the last stretch of the trip. Fogg sits in custody until Fix learns the truth, and that detour nearly ruins everything.”
• If they say: “Fogg is a cold calculating fish.”
  You say: “Mostly, but I remember he rescues Aouda in India, where she was about to be burned on her late husband's funeral pyre. He risks the bet and his own neck.”