The opening chapter alone holds forth the promise of a tantalising read, unusual_x000D_ for a book on commercial law. It begins with an account of English adventurers_x000D_ bound for Virginia who are shipwrecked off Bermuda. This sets the scene for the_x000D_ subsequent settlement of the uninhabited islands by the British in 1609. The incident_x000D_ fires the imagination of the Bard. He references the "Bermoothes" in The Tempest (1st ed., 1623), conceiving "the islands as a place where valuable property could be safely hidden" (at p. 3). Fact, fiction and fortune are masterfully blended into a cocktail of factors explaining Bermuda's development as an offshore financial centre. It is evident that painstaking efforts were made to create a legal work that is at once both practical and scholarly. This book rejects the patois of the commercial marketplace for a more elegant literary style which flows right through the book and lends cohesiveness to the contributions by some 25 authors. The result is a comprehensive manual for offshore business in Bermuda and one which is a reflection of the country's sophistication as an offshore financial centre.

In recent years, a number of Singapore cases have come to the attention of common law trust lawyers outside Singapore. The emphasis on Singapore’s distinctiveness as an equity jurisdiction reflects trends in the field since Yihan Goh and Paul Tan’s Singapore Law: 50 Years in the Making (2015). To that end, Christopher Hare and Vincent Ooi’s book provides a strong and detailed coverage of the current state of Singapore trust law.