Missing out on the Booker and Whitbread prizes has not stopped Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, lingering on the bestseller lists. Now it is to be made into a film by the team who created the Oscar-winning film Iris.

Sir Richard Eyre, former artistic director of the National Theatre, will direct Atonement - his second film venture since adapting and directing the story of the novelist Iris Murdoch, based on the best-selling memoirs of her husband, John Bayley.

The London stage impresario Robert Fox, who co-produced Iris, will head the production. The playwright Christopher Hampton, who won an Oscar for his 1988 screenplay adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, will start work on the script once he finishes directing his latest film, Imagining Argentina - a story of Argentina's "disappeared", starring Emma Thompson.

Atonement will not be cast until at least next year. After Iris's three Oscar nominations and Jim Broadbent's best supporting actor award, the project is expected to attract young British talent.

The team denied plans to Americanise the story. Mr Fox said: "We are in the very early stages of finalising arrangements, but I can say it will be a very different film to Iris, in terms of subject matter and tone. It is a very English story and we will be sticking to that."