How to pick a Man Booker prizewinner

John Dugdale wonders whether it is possible to determine a Booker winner on the strength of their first sentence

Plenty of readers of the dazzling opening to Hilary Mantel's 2012 winner, Bring Up the Bodies "His children are falling from the sky", both a tease and a foreshadowing as Cromwell is watching falcons named after his children and the book will trace the fall of his daughter-like former ally Anne Boleyn will have wondered if the judges could have skipped the longlist and shortlist stages to give her the cheque immediately. Other recent winners' openings have similarly fused brevity and subtlety Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending begins a list with "I remember, in no particular order", Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question starts "He should have seen it coming."

Brevity is also the dominant trend in the first sentences of the 2014 longlist, favoured by Jacobson again in J ("Mornings weren't good for either of them"), Paul Kingsnorth in his 11th-century novel The Wake ("the night was clere though i slept i seen it"), Joshua Ferris in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ("The mouth is a weird place") and Richard Flanagan ("Why at the beginning of things is there always light?") in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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