FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—Toronto, ON, Tuesday, April 22, 2025 – Beth Weir, co-author of Writing While Masked: Reflections on 2020 and Beyond, a collection of essays and poems, has signed with Ingenium Books to publish her first fiction book.

Weir’s upcoming novel is about a woman grappling with creating a new role in life after giving up her career earlier than planned to allow her husband to pursue his dream job.

Weir had written about life in retirement in her Substack Stops Along the Way before deciding to make it the theme for a work of fiction. “The book has persisted in telling me it wants to be between the covers,” she said about A Marriage and a Mouse (working title). “This is a story about how a mature relationship weathers an unexpected challenge based on experiences within it and the wisdom collected over the years.”

Weir is a Kiwi by birth but lived in the United States for most of her adult life, with a three-month stint in Brazil that she chronicled in the travel memoir Brazil is a Full Plate. She currently lives in New Zealand again. Drawing on her own experience as a retired educator to create her novel, she said, “I have retired twice now. Once from a professional life at the college level and the second as the director of a garden. The challenges and joys in retirement are often different from those you imagined. Writing about it in novel form was therapeutic.”

“For many of us, the idea of retiring sounds more daunting the closer it gets,” said Boni Wagner-Stafford, publisher at Ingenium Books. “Beth uses humour and quirky characters to tackle some serious issues and help give us insight into what we can look forward to once we lay down tools for the last time. Beth provides an entertaining read that anyone approaching retirement can use as a guide for how to navigate this new status in life.”

Beth’s novel is slated for release in December 2025.

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Media inquiries:

Boni Wagner-Stafford, publisher, Ingenium Books
boni@ingeniumbooks.com
1-(647)-576-2434