WASHINGTON, Jan 7: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s last book — Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West -- will be published on Feb 12, six days before the elections.

Publisher HarperCollins said they originally planned to bring out the book on April 8 but her assassination on Dec 27 forced them to advance the publication.

In the book, completed just days before she was killed, Ms Bhutto, who collaborated with her friend Mark Siegel, a Washington lobbyist, argues that Islam should be reconciled with democratic principles.

The book opens with a chronicle of her return to Pakistan in October after eight years of exile and the assassination attempt upon her return.

Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now co-chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, has written a short afterword with her three children.

“No one could have known that these would be Benazir Bhutto’s final words, and somehow that makes them carry even more weight, especially at a time like this,” said Tim Duggan, who edited the book. “This book is her legacy.”

HarperCollins has also bought paperback rights to the “Daughter of the East,” Ms Bhutto’s autobiography, originally published in Britain in 1988.

It will be reissued in the United States in the spring under the title “Daughter of Destiny.”