The first consignment of Faces of Courage , the controversial book on Ipoh's WWII resistance heroine Sybil Kathigasu will be in the country next week following the green light from the government.

According Edwin Dutton, a Kuala Lumpur spokesperson for the Singapore-based distributor Horizon Books, Malaysians can expect the books to be displayed and sold in bookshops in Malaysia by next Friday.

Faces of Courage , published by the Singapore's Media Masters which also earlier marketed the memoirs of communist veteran Chin Peng, combined the original 1954 wartime memoirs of Sybil Karthigasu No Dram of Mercy with a memorial essay of Chin Peng as well as investigative reports on the Karthigasu's family written by veteran Australian journalists Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor.

Although the book had been submitted by the publisher to the Home Affairs Ministry for approval to be released for sale in Malaysia on March 31 last year, no decision had been made until January this year. Last June, twenty copies of the book were seized by custom officers on the causeway in Johor Bahru.

Wartime memoirs published in 1954

Sybil Kathigasu (1900-1948), a Eurasian Malayan, was the wife of Dr AC Kathigasu who operated a clinic at No 141, Brewster Road in Ipoh in the pre-war years. She is remembered and revered by many as a resistance heroine who saved many lives during the 44-month Japanese occupation.

She was arrested and brutally tortured by the occupiers' secret military police and died after the war as the result of multiple injuries.

Sybil Kartigasu's wartime memoirs No Dram of Mercy was first published in London in 1954 by Neville Spearman and reprinted in Singapore in 1983 by Oxford University Press (OUP).

In 2005, the English original was translated into Chinese and published for the first time in Kuala Lumpur by Prometheus Enterprise.