Last year, my favourite newspaper ran a special report on Gen Z. Among its claims was that this screen-bound generation is having less sex than those before it. I was taken aback enough to write to the editor. None of them told you, I asked, that sex is not necessarily penetration? The worry behind the question was simple. We may be misunderstanding how young people think about intimacy altogether. Patrick Shyaka’s Where Women Meet Boys is useful precisely because it exposes that misunderstanding. Not by disputing statistics, but by showing what desire, restraint, and emotional negotiation actually look like up close.
If anything, Shyaka’s characters do not lack sexual language. They speak about sex constantly. They name it, joke about it, gesture toward it, threaten it, withhold it. What they seem less inclined to do is follow through. Sex becomes something discussed, signalled, and theorised more than practiced. The result is not prudishness, but a peculiar excess of talk paired with a deficit of surrender.
Patrick Shyaka’s debut book is a collection of short stories, eleven in all, preoccupied with relationships that hover rather than land. Lovers circle one another. Friends test the limits of closeness. Encounters promise transformation and then dissolve into ambiguity. Falling in love, falling out of it, and deciding not to fall at all are treated as equally serious acts. What binds the collection is not plot but mood: a persistent hesitation, a carefulness that passes for maturity. Desire is everywhere, but it is managed. Intimacy is present, but provisional.
Shyaka writes with restraint, and it feels deliberate rather than thin. His sentences are clean, almost classical, and, at times, he chooses the longer, more formal construction where a simpler one would do.
Across the collection, Shyaka returns to a small set of concerns. Friendship as a holding pattern for desire. Emotional clarity that arrives too late, or is offered in ways that wound. Relationships sustained more by habit than conviction. There are stories about wanting without readiness, about choosing distance in the name of honesty, and about the quiet negotiations people make to avoid being fully seen. Together, they sketch a generation fluent in the language of boundaries, but unsure what to do once those boundaries are in place.
Where the book succeeds most clearly is in its prose. Shyaka writes with restraint, and it feels deliberate rather than thin. His sentences are clean, almost classical, and, at times, he chooses the longer, more formal construction where a simpler one would do. “I tell him he must do no such thing,” he writes at one point, opting for precision and cadence over conversational ease. It is a small choice, but a revealing one. This is writing that respects language. It slows the reader down. It avoids the slang-heavy looseness that dominates much contemporary youth writing.
At the same time, Shyaka seems fond of closing his stories with deliberately shocking lines, as if to rupture the calm he has carefully built. In one instance, a character recalls: “So, I placed my hand on his shoulder, gave him a firm squeeze, and with all the grace I could muster, told him to suck my dick.” The sentence is forceful, even funny in its bluntness, and it certainly lands. But repeated often enough, this reliance on shock risks becoming a stylistic habit. What initially feels transgressive can begin to feel predictable, as though the stories mistrust their own quiet power.
There are also moments where the texture of the world slips. I was genuinely startled to find myself scribbling “What??” in the margin when a character is said to have ordered his “usual”: crême brûlée and hot chocolate. Perhaps it is a thing somewhere, but it rang false enough to pull me briefly out of the story. These are small details, but fiction depends on such small acts of credibility.
One story, however, cuts deeper than the rest. Steve is the most piercing piece in the collection, not because it is louder, but because it abandons romantic uncertainty for something more elemental: grief. Here, Shyaka steps away from the choreography of desire and attends to loss, its dullness, its confusion, its refusal to announce itself properly. The story feels timely. In the years since the pandemic, many of us have lost people, often without ceremony, without the pause grief seems to require. Life moves on quickly; work resumes; attention shifts. Steve captures that uneasy truth: that mourning has become compressed, postponed, sometimes almost impolite. One finishes the story wondering whether this is resilience, or whether we are simply becoming accustomed to losing people.
