Atonement author looks towards whole new aria

The best-selling author and two friends are working on an adaptation which would bring the doomed love story, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in the big screen version, to the stage.

McEwan, who scooped the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam, told The Times he agreed to the project "several weeks ago".

Poet Craig Raine will write the words and composer and radio presenter Michael Berkeley is set to write the music.

"It's not a chamber piece, that's for sure," McEwan told the newspaper. You can do some very big dramatic things with this.

"If you were thinking of a large-scale opera then what springs to mind is 380,000 troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. That would be quite a choir."

Set in an England of class divisions and war, the 2001 novel was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.