My Mother Next Door

It's hardly newsworthy when a man walks out on his family. But it's rather unusual for a mother to walk out, leaving the father to bring up their sixteen-year-old daughter-and downright scandalous for said Irish Catholic mother to move into the house next door to start a new life with a bunch of hot male students at the age of sixty.

No one can accuse Diane Danvers Simmons of telling a familiar story. Instead she offers a wickedly witty, candid, irreverent, British coming-of-age story with a...