The star of The Sum of Our Follies is the story of characters is a fictional backwater town called Lubok Sayong, in a so called 'developing country' (In Malaysia but could be anywhere in Asia) with no claim to fame apart from its annual floods, a dubious legend and general mediocrity, struggling with modernity and globalization; a town with characters that could be compared to those of Amado and Narayan, and Calvino, including the magic. This is Malaysia (and Asia) in a nutshell.