Originally published as three separate volumes—Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog—A Bestiary relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage.

In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources for many of his best novels, from Scenes from a Receding Past to Langrishe, Go Down, giving the reader a rare look into the "story behind the story." But A Bestiary is more than a factual expose—this collection of memoirs is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.