It is a rare sight in publishing. There - nestling on the 2002 bestseller list of all books, above the Highway Code, Harry Potters and stories calculated for a popular market - is a literary novel.

Ian McEwan's Atonement emerged yesterday as Britain's third top selling book for the year in the run-up to Christmas in the Nielsen BookScan charts. It also beat a diet manual and more conventionally appealing titles by authors such as Tony Parsons, Sebastian Faulks and Dave Pelzer.

Atonement follows the life of an English country house family through peace and war for 60 years. It is one of the few novels of its kind to have done so well since sales of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses were boosted by the Iranian fatwa in 1989.

It was passed over for both the Booker and Whitbread prizes but won the £5,000 WH Smith literary award.

With sales of 444,000 copies, it was beaten only by Billy, Pamela Stephenson's biography of her tearaway entertainer husband (517,000), and Nick Hornby's How to be Good (477,000).

Three Harry Potter stories, Goblet of Fire, Prisoner of Azkaban and Chamber of Secrets, were in fourth, fifth and seventh places, with the perennially topselling Highway Code sixth.