"Sooner or later the plateau of summer tilts and everything that isn't nailed down or holding on for dear life rolls off. This may come as a complete surprise if you haven't been around for long."

These, the first lines of the last story, are your welcome and your warning. Forty-one rhymes, poems and stories will lead you - if you simply follow their word-crumb trail - through the empty quarter of the year, the districts of Fall, Halloween and Winter. Spend a late afternoon in the library watching the leaves fall outside. Be exposed to windy cliffs and homeless skies. Travel through innocent, if wistful, miniature fairytales of early autumn.

But be warned: once you enter the territory of The Scarecrow Hunter, the companionable crows of summer become foreign and remote. Beyond the village of Halloween, the trail goes blind, the stories become complex, hard-edged, severe. If you need to be convinced that things have taken a turn for the worse, the longer stories - such as Splintered Bone Road and The Silent Howling of the Wind-Swept Moon - should do the trick.

A Year Tightens Its Belt is a companion book to Sharing Imaginary Things which is assigned to the districts of Spring, Summer, Childhood, and Dreams.