•Why it earns a slot
The novel invented the template of the globe-spanning race against time, introduced the dramatic device of the day gained by eastward travel, and embedded its adventure in the real infrastructure of the 1870s, making it a precise snapshot of the Victorian world's new connectivity by steam and rail.
On a wager of twenty thousand pounds, the rigidly methodical Englishman Phileas Fogg sets out from London on 2 October 1872 to circumnavigate the globe in exactly eighty days, accompanied by his new French manservant Passepartout. Their journey through Suez, India, Hong Kong, Japan, and America is shadowed by detective Fix, who wrongly believes Fogg is a bank robber, and complicated by a series of obstacles including a gap in the Indian railway, a suttee rescue, a Sioux attack, and a coal shortage at sea. Fogg arrives at the Reform Club apparently one minute late and ruined, only to discover he has gained a day by travelling eastward and has won the bet after all, along with the love of Aouda, the Indian woman he rescued.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.