Francis Groff is a Belgian journalist, documentary director for television, scriptwriter and novelist. He has worked for written press (dailies and weeklies), radio and television.

Between 1993 and 1999, he was the first public ombudsman in Wallonia, handling nearly 3,000 files relating to complaints concerning municipal services, hospitals, police services, CPAS, emergency services, etc.

Since 2018, Francis Groff has devoted himself mainly to writing novels and short stories. He is the author of several books.

A keen observer of contemporary life, Francis Groff explores the flaws, silences and secrets of seemingly ordinary lives.

L'Homme sous le toit is part of a body of work where the intimate often rubs shoulders with the tragic, and where each character seems to carry the weight of his or her own enigmas.

With a fluid, precise style, sometimes tinged with irony, Francis Groff reveals humanity in all its complexity - modest, awkward, overwhelming.

Quick introduction

“A highly addictive psychological drama”

Summary 

In a small, uneventful French town, a family lives peacefully in an ordinary house. A quiet, almost banal happiness, until an illness upsets the balance. Nothing serious, you think at first. Just a discreet shadow that creeps into everyday life, insidious, almost harmless. Then comes the tragedy. Unthinkable. Incomprehensible. Inside the house, the silence thickens, life curls up. In the attic, in a refuge he has created for himself to escape reality, a father isolates himself, filling in the pages of a notebook as if to ward off the unacceptable.

Three voices are heard in this oppressive in camera setting: that of the man, that of the narrator, and that of the cat, an elusive witness who watches impassively as the cracks open up.

Over the pages, the drama unfolds, relentless, revealing the depths of human behaviour.

Press & medias :

“Once there was Colette's cat, Romain Gary's cat and Jean Cocteau's cat, but now we have to reckon with Francis Groff's cat. Lurking behind a curtain or purring with one eye half-closed on a cushion, the cat is the spectator-seer of a drama unfolding in a seemingly peaceful house. In this tale of growing suspense right up to the terrible finale, it's not the omniscient narrator who knows everything and pulls all the strings, it's the cat who knows everything and observes everything. But that's all we're going to say. We'll just tell you that Gabriel Lepape, a somewhat debonair and indolent father, had everything to be happy with his wife and twin daughters.

But the family's happiness is about to unravel.

A key witness has seen it all: the cat! But will the cat be a witness for the prosecution?”

“We strongly recommend that you read ‘L'Homme sous le toit’, published by éditions F deville, a former bookseller with a flair for producing excellent works.”

“L'homme sous le toit" shares many similarities with Simenon's hard-boiled novels. Groff has created a huis-clos multiplied, literally ‘put in abyss’."

“A great success!     Francis Groff has seduced many readers with his delicious crime novels, alternating tense and bittersweet scenes, violence and humour, and didacticism. In L'homme sous le toit, he goes further, tightening his writing and his narrative, pushing characters and readers insensitively towards the abyss, despite the strange charm that transcends the pages.”