Dr Worthington has produced a clear and scholarly analysis of the law relating to proprietary interests in commercial transactions which will prove to be an invaluable source both for practitioners working in the area and for academics with an interest in commercial law and personal property law. The origins of this book lie in a Ph.D. thesis and its transition into a monograph cannot have been an easy one. The principal cause of difficulty must have been the untimely intervention of the House of Lords in Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v. Islington London Borough Council [1996] A.C. 669, which came too late to be incorporated into the text itself. Dr Worthington was able to include an 18-page addendum at the beginning of the book in which she deals with the central issues in the case and she subjects aspects of the speeches to critical analysis but it was unfortunate that she was deprived of the opportunity to integrate the discussion into the text and to give the case the treatment it deserved, particularly given the fact that the approach which prevailed in the House of Lords is rather different from the thesis advanced by Dr Worthington (she does, however, discuss the case in more detail in her essay “The Proprietary Consequences of Contract Failure” in F. D. Rose (ed.), Failure of Contracts: Contractual, Restitutionary and Proprietary Consequences (1997), (p. 67)).